Fine Arts in the Modern World: LA_104_

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

52

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts ca. 1900–1950

Chapter

34

Volume2404

“Where is God now?” Elie Wiesel

Figure 34.1 SERGEI M. EISENSTEIN, The Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Film stills from Act IV, “The Odessa Steps Massacre.”

BK6_001-173.indd 52BK6_001-173.indd 52 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

53

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

L O O K I N G A H E A D

Total Wars

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 405

405Volume2

Two fundamentally related calamities afflicted the twentieth

century: total war and totalitarian dictatorship. The consequences

of both were so great that the world has still not recovered from

them. Total war and totalitarianism, facilitated by sophisticated

military technology and electronic forms of mass communication,

caused the twentieth century to be the bloodiest in world history.

Unlike the Black Death, the Lisbon earthquake, and other natural

disasters the wars and totalitarian regimes of the Modern Era

were perpetrated on human beings by human beings. These

human-made disasters not only challenged the belief that

technology would improve the quality of human life, they seemed

to validate Freud’s theory that mortals are driven by base instincts

and the dark forces of self-destruction.

The two world wars of the twentieth century provide the

context for the arts of this era. Many writers, painters, and

composers responded directly with visceral antiwar statements.

Others, acknowledging the requirements of totalitarian regimes,

those of Hitler in Germany, Stalin in Russia, and Mao in China,

produced works that responded to the revolutionary ideologies of

the state. Photography and film—media that appealed directly to

the masses—became important wartime vehicles, functioning

both as propaganda and as documentary evidence of brutality and

despair. The era inspired two of the twentieth century’s leading

artists to produce landmark Modernist works: T. S. Eliot’s The

Waste Land and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

In the West, the end of the nineteenth century was a time of relative peace and optimistic faith in the progress of humankind. Throughout the world, however, sharp con- trasts existed between rich and poor, and between techno- logically backward and technologically advanced nations. As the more powerful states jockeyed for political and eco- nomic primacy, and as Europe and the United States con- tinued to build their industrial and military strength, few anticipated the possibility of widespread armed conflict. In 1914, however, that possibility became a reality with the outbreak of the first of two world wars. World War I, the first total war in world history, ended forever the so-called “age of innocence.” And by the end of World War II in 1945, nothing would ever seem certain again.

The Great War of 1914, as World War I was called, and World War II, which followed in 1939, are called “total” not only because they involved more nations than

had ever before been engaged in armed combat, but because they killed—along with military personnel— large numbers of civilians. Further, they were total in the sense that they were fought with a “no holds barred” atti- tude—all methods of destruction were utilized in the name of conquest.

The weapons of advanced technology made warfare more impersonal and more devastating than ever before. World War I combatants used machine guns, heavy artillery, hand grenades, poison gas, flame throwers, armored tanks, submarines, dirigibles (airships), and air- planes. From their open cockpits, pilots fired on enemy air- craft, while on land soldiers fought from lines of trenches dug deep into the ground. The rapid-firing, fully automat- ic machine gun alone caused almost 80 percent of the casu- alties. The cost of four years of war was approximately $350 billion, and the death tolls were staggering. In all, seventy million armed men fought in World War I, and more than eight million of them died. In World War II, airplanes and aerial bombs (including, ultimately, the atomic bomb) played major roles; war costs tripled those of World War I, and casualties among the Allied forces alone rose to over eighteen million people.

The underlying cause of both wars was aggressive rivalry between European powers. During the nineteenth century, nationalism and industrialism had facilitated militant competition for colonies throughout the world (see chapter 30); the armed forces became the embodiment of a nation’s sovereign spirit and the primary tool for imperialism. National leaders fiercely defended the notion that military might was the best safeguard of peace: “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—“if you want peace, prepare for war,” they argued. Nations believed their safety lay in defensive alliances. They joined with their ideological or geographic neighbors to create a system of alliances that, by the early twentieth century, divided Europe into two potentially hostile camps, each equipped to mobilize their armies if threatened.

World War I The circumstances that led to World War I involved the increasingly visible efforts of Austria-Hungary and Germany to dominate vast portions of Eastern Europe. Germany, having risen to power during the nineteenth century, rivaled all other European nations in industrial might. By the early twentieth century, German efforts to colonize markets for trade took the form of militant imperialism in Eastern Europe. In July of 1914, Austria- Hungary, seeking to expand Austrian territory to the south, used the political assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand (heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary) as a pretext to declare war on Serbia. Almost immediately, two opposing alliances came into confrontation: the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire versus the Allied forces of Serbia, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Russia. Clearly, the policy of peace through military strength had not prevented war but actu- ally encouraged it.

BK6_001-173.indd 53BK6_001-173.indd 53 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

54

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

World War I Literature

*

*

*

*

SPAIN (neutral)

PO RT

U G

AL

FRANCE

CORSICA

SARDINIA

BELGIUM

GREAT BRITAIN

SWITZERLAND (neutral)

GERMANY

NETHERLANDS (neutral)

ITALY

SICILY

GREECE

ALBANIA (neutral)

MONTENEGRO

EGYPT (associated with Allied powers)

SERBIA

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

BULGARIA

ROMANIA

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

UKRAINE

CYPRUS

POLAND

DENMARK (neutral)

NORWAY (neutral) SWEDEN

(neutral)

FINLAND

R U S S I A

AT L A N T I C

O C E A N

BALTIC SEA

NORTH SEA

M E D I T E R R A N E A N S E A

B L A C K S E A

Br iti

sh b

lo ck

ad e

Western front

German penetration of Russia 1918

Russian front 1917

Russian front

1914–15

Balkan front 1916

Gallipoli 1915–16

Caporetto 1917

Tannenberg 1914

Jutland 1916

Seine

Loire R

hi ne

Elbe

Oder

Danu be

D on

Kiel Canal

Paris

London

Munich

Berlin

Prague

Rome

Sarajevo

Vienna

Bucharest

Constantinople

Warsaw Brest Litovsk

Riga

Petrograd

Moscow

Key

Allied powers

Central powers Occupied by central powers at their height

Front line Major battle *

N

E W

S

0 500 miles

500 kilometers0

Seine M arne

Somme

Lys

Paris

FRANCE

Somme 1916 St.-Quentin *

*

*

*

Ypres 1914, 1915, 1917

Antwerp

Brussels

BELGIUM

Reims Verdun

1916 Marne 1914, 1918

0 50 m

50 km 0

The Western Front Trench line 1914 Hindenburg line 1917 at end of German retreat Allied line 1918

406 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2406

At the beginning of the war, the Central Powers won early victories in Belgium and Poland, but the Allies stopped the German advance at the First Battle of the Marne in September of 1914 (Map 34.1). The opposing armies settled down to warfare along the western front—a solid line of two opposing trenches that stretched 500 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss border. At the same time, on the eastern front, Russian armies lost over a million men in combat against the combined German and Austrian forces. In the early years of the war, the United States remained neutral, but when German submarines began sinking unarmed passenger ships in 1917, the American president Woodrow Wilson opted to aid the Allies in order to “make the world safe for democ- racy.” Fortified by American supplies and troops, the Allies moved toward victory. In November 1918, the fighting ended with an armistice.

World War I Poetry Writers responded to the war with sentiments ranging from buoyant idealism and militant patriotism to frustration and despair. The most enduring literature of the era, however, expressed the bitter anguish of the war experience itself. The poetry of the young British officer Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) reflects the sense of cynicism and futility that was voiced toward the end of the war. Owen viewed war as a senseless waste of human resources and a barbaric form of human behavior. His poems, which question the meaning of wartime heroism, unmask “the old Lie” that it is “fitting and proper to die for one’s country.” The poet was killed in combat at the age of twenty-five, just one week before the armistice was signed.

Map 34.1 World War I, 1914–1918.

BK6_001-173.indd 54BK6_001-173.indd 54 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

READING 34.2

Q It has been said that Eliot favored “biblical rhythms.” Do you detect any in this excerpt? What effects do they achieve?

READING 34.1

Q Why does the poet try to reconcile the technology of modern war with traditional ideals of patriotism?

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

55

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 407

From Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)

V. What the Thunder Said

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses

If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water

. . . . . . . . . .

Eliot’s contemporary and one of the greatest lyricists of the century, William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), responded to the violence of World War I and to the prevailing mood of unrest in his native Ireland with the apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming.” The title of the poem alludes both to the long-awaited Second Coming of Jesus and to the nameless force that, in Yeats’ view, threatened to enthrall the world in darkness.

Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est”1 (1918)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 1 Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, 5 But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines2 that drop behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, 10 But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight 15 He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin, 20 If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 25 To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Other poets viewed the war as symbolic of a dying Western civilization. The poet T. S. Eliot, whom we met in chapter 32, summed up this view in his classic poem The Waste Land (1922). This requiem for a dry and sterile cul- ture is structured like a collection of individual poems, each narrated by a different speaker at a different time, but all evoking the themes of loss and hope for redemption. Incorporating quotations in Greek, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, the poem makes reference to Classical and Celtic mythology, the Bible, Saint Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, Wagner, the Hindu Upanishads, the sermons of the Buddha, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (see chapter 31), and other canonic works. The inclusion of such references, while indicative of Eliot’s eru- dition, required that the poet himself append footnotes to the text. The Waste Land became the single most influen- tial poem in early modern literature. Its incantatory rhythms and profound allusions established the idiom of modern poetry as compressed, complex, and serious.

1 “It is fitting and proper to die for one’s country.” A line from “Ode III” by the Roman poet Horace (see chapter 6).

2 Gas shells.

407Volume2BK6_001-173.indd 55BK6_001-173.indd 55 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

56

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

READING 34.3

Q Is the Second Coming Yeats describes one of deliverance or destruction?

READING 34.4

408 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2408

Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (1921)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre1 1 The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5 The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi2

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15 Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

World War I Fiction World War I also inspired some of this century’s most outstanding fiction—much of it written by men who had engaged in field combat. The American Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) immortalized the Allied offensive in Italy in A Farewell to Arms (1929). The novel, whose title reflects the desperate hope that World War I would be “the war to end all wars,” is a study in disillusionment and a testament to the futility of armed combat. Hemingway’s prose is char- acterized by understatement and journalistic succinctness. His profound respect for physical and emotional courage, apparent in all his novels, was forged on the battlefields of the war, which he observed firsthand.

Armed conflict had a similar influence on the life and work of the novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970). Remarque, a German soldier who was wounded in combat several times, brought first-hand experience of World War I to his book All Quiet on the Western Front. Perhaps the finest war novel of the twentieth century, it portrays with horrifying clarity the brutal realities of trench warfare and poison gas, two of the most chilling features of the war. Remarque tells the story in first-person, present-tense narrative, a style that compels the reader to share the

apprehension of the protagonist. Over one million copies of Remarque’s novel were sold in Germany during the year of its publication, and similar success greeted it in trans- lation and in its three movie versions. In 1939, however, the Nazi regime in Germany condemned Remarque’s out- spoken antimilitarism by publicly burning his books and depriving him of German citizenship. Shortly thereafter, Remarque moved to the United States, where he became an American citizen.

From Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

An indigent looking wood receives us. We pass by the soup- 1 kitchens. Under cover of the wood we climb out. The lorries turn back. They are to collect us again in the morning, before dawn.

Mist and the smoke of guns lie breast-high over the fields. The moon is shining. Along the road troops file. Their helmets gleam softly in the moonlight. The heads and the rifles stand out above the white mist, nodding heads, rocking carriers of guns.

Farther on the mist ends. Here the heads become figures; 10 coats, trousers, and boots appear out of the mist as from a milky pool. They become a column. The column marches on, straight ahead, the figures resolve themselves into a block, individuals are no longer recognizable, the dark wedge presses onward, fantastically topped by the heads and weapons floating off on the milky pool. A column—not men at all.

Guns and munition wagons are moving along a crossroad. The backs of the horses shine in the moonlight, their movements are beautiful, they toss their heads, and their eyes gleam. The guns and the wagons float before the dim 20 background of the moonlit landscape, the riders in their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is strangely beautiful and arresting.

We push on to the pioneer dump. Some of us load our shoulders with pointed and twisted iron stakes; others thrust smooth iron rods through rolls of wire and go off with them. The burdens are awkward and heavy.

The ground becomes more broken. From ahead come warnings: “Look out, deep shell-holes on the left”—“Mind, trenches”— — — 30

Our eyes peer out, our feet and our sticks feel in front of us before they take the weight of the body. Suddenly the line halts; I bump my face against the roll of wire carried by the man in front and curse.

There are some shell-smashed lorries in the road. Another order: “Cigarettes and pipes out.” We are getting near the line.

In the meantime it has become pitch dark. We skirt a small wood and then have the front-line immediately before us.

An uncertain, red glow spreads along the skyline from one end to the other. It is in perpetual movement, punctuated with 40 the bursts of flame from the muzzles of the batteries. Balls of light rise up high above it, silver and red spheres which explode and rain down in showers of red, white, and green stars. French rockets go up, which unfold a silk parachute to the air and drift slowly down. They light up everything as

1 A circular course traced by the upward sweep of a falcon. The image reflects Yeats’ cyclical view of history.

2 World Spirit, similar to the Jungian Great Memory of shared archetypal images.

BK6_001-173.indd 56BK6_001-173.indd 56 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

57

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 409

sleeve is torn away by a splinter. I shut my fist. No pain. Still that does not reassure me: wounds don’t hurt till afterwards. I feel the arm all over. It is grazed but sound. Now a crack on the skull, I begin to lose consciousness. Like lightning the thought comes to me: Don’t faint, sink down in the black broth and immediately come up the top again. A splinter slashes into my helmet, but has travelled so far that it does not go through. I 110 wipe the mud out of my eyes. A hole is torn up in front of me. Shells hardly ever land in the same hole twice, I’ll get into it. With one bound I fling myself down and lie on the earth as flat as a fish; there it whistles again, quickly I crouch together, claw for cover, feel something on the left, shove in beside it, it gives way, I groan, the earth leaps, the blast thunders in my ears, I creep under the yielding thing, cover myself with it, draw it over me, it is wood, cloth, cover, cover, miserable cover against the whizzing splinters.

I open my eyes—my fingers grasp a sleeve, an arm. A 120 wounded man? I yell to him—no answer—a dead man. My hand gropes farther, splinters of wood—now I remember again that we are lying in the graveyard.

But the shelling is stronger than everything. It wipes out the sensibilities, I merely crawl still deeper into the coffin, it should protect me, and especially as Death himself lies in it too.

Before me gapes the shell-hole. I grasp it with my eyes as with fists. With one leap I must be in it. There, I get a smack in the face, a hand clamps on to my shoulder—has the dead man waked up?—The hand shakes me, I turn my head, in the 130 second of light I stare into the face of Katczinsky, he has his mouth wide open and is yelling. I hear nothing, he rattles me, comes nearer, in a momentary lull his voice reaches me: “Gas—Gaas—Gaaas—Pass it on.”

I grab for my gas-mask. Some distance from me there lies someone. I think of nothing but this: That fellow there must know: Gaaas—Gaaas— — —

I call, I lean toward him, I swipe at him with the satchel, he doesn’t see—once again, again—he merely ducks—it’s a recruit—I look at Kat desperately, he has his mask ready—I 140 pull out mine too, my helmet falls to one side, it slips over my face, I reach the man, his satchel is on the side nearest me, I seize the mask, pull it over his head, he understands, I let go and with a jump drop back into the shell-hole.

The dull thud of the gas-shells mingles with the crashes of the high explosives. A bell sounds between the explosions, gongs, and metal clappers warning everyone—Gas—Gas— Gaas.

Someone plumps down behind me, another. I wipe the goggles of my mask clear of the moist breath. It is Kat, Kropp, 150 and someone else. All four of us lie there in heavy, watchful suspense and breathe as lightly as possible.

These first minutes with the mask decide between life and death: is it tightly woven? I remember the awful sights in the hospital: the gas patients who in day-long suffocation cough their burnt lungs up in clots.

Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jelly-fish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely. I nudge Kat, it is better to crawl out and lie on top 160 than to stay here where the gas collects most. But we don’t get

bright as day, their light shines on us and we see our shadows sharply outlined on the ground. They hover for the space of a minute before they burn out. Immediately fresh ones shoot up to the sky, and again, green, red, and blue stars.

“Bombardment,” says Kat. 50 The thunder of the guns swells to a single heavy roar and

then breaks up again into separate explosions. The dry bursts of the machine-guns rattle. Above us the air teems with invisible swift movements, with howls, piping, and hisses. They are the smaller shells;—and amongst them, booming through the night like an organ, go the great coal-boxes and the heavies. They have a hoarse, distant bellow like a rutting stag and make their way high above the howl and whistle of the smaller shells. It reminds me of flocks of wild geese when I hear them. Last autumn the wild geese flew day after day 60 across the path of the shells.

The searchlights begin to sweep the dark sky. They slide along it like gigantic tapering rulers. One of them pauses, and quivers a little. Immediately a second is beside him, a black insect is caught between them and tries to escape—the airman. He hesitates, is blinded and falls. . . .

We go back. It is time we returned to the lorries. The sky is become a bit brighter. Three o’clock in the morning. The breeze is fresh and cool, the pale hour makes our faces look grey.

We trudge onward in single file through the trenches and 70 shell-holes and come again to the zone of mist. Katczinsky is restive, that’s a bad sign.

“What’s up, Kat?” says Kropp. “I wish I were back home.” Home—he means the huts. “It won’t last much longer, Kat.” He is nervous. “I don’t know, I don’t know— — —” We come to the communication-trench and then to the open

fields. The little wood reappears; we know every foot of ground here. There’s the cemetery with the mounds and the black crosses. 80

That moment it breaks out behind us, swells, roars, and thunders. We duck down—a cloud of flame shoots up a hundred yards ahead of us.

The next minute under a second explosion part of the wood rises slowly in the air, three or four trees sail up and then crash to pieces. The shells begin to hiss like safety-valves—heavy fire— — —

“Take cover!” yells somebody—“Cover!” The fields are flat, the wood is too distant and dangerous—

the only cover is the graveyard and the mounds. We stumble 90 across in the dark and as though spirited away every man lies glued behind a mound.

Not a moment too soon. The dark goes mad. It heaves and raves. Darkness blacker than the night rushes on us with giant strides, over us and away. The flames of the explosions light up the graveyard.

There is no escape anywhere. By the light of the shells I try to get a view of the fields. They are a surging sea, daggers of flame from the explosions leap up like fountains. It is impossible for anyone to break through it. 100

The wood vanishes, it is pounded, crushed, torn to pieces. We must stay here in the graveyard.

The earth bursts before us. It rains clods. I feel a smack. My

409Volume2BK6_001-173.indd 57BK6_001-173.indd 57 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

58

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Q What elements contribute to a sense of the macabre in this piece?

Q How does Remarque achieve cinematic momentum?

World War I Art

410 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2410

with Iran, received renewed international attention during the widely televised Gulf War of 1991, when images of both soldiers and civilians donning gas masks were a common, if appalling, sight.

Grosz The art of George Grosz (1893–1959) was unique in its imaginative blend of social criticism and biting satire. Discharged from the army in 1916 after a brief experience at the front, Grosz mocked the German military and its corrupt and mindless bureaucracy in sketchy, brittle com- positions filled with pungent caricatures. For example, the wartime pen and ink drawing, Fit for Active Service (Figure 34.3), shows a fat German army doctor pronouncing a skeletal cadaver “O.K.,” hence, fit to serve in combat. Here, Grosz makes pointed reference to the prevailing military practice of drafting old (and even ill) recruits. In a trench- ant line style, he evokes a sense of the macabre similar to that captured by Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front. Like Remarque (and hundreds of other European artists and writers), Grosz fled Nazi Germany for the

Figure 34.2 MAX ERNST, Two Ambiguous Figures, 1919. Collage with gouache and pencil, 91⁄2 � 61⁄2 in. Ernst produced this provocative image by painting over a page torn from a teaching aids catalogue for scientific equipment used in chemistry and biology.

as far as that; a second bombardment begins. It is no longer as though the shells roared; it is the earth itself raging.

With a crash something black bears down on us. It lands close beside us; a coffin thrown up.

I see Kat move and crawl across. The coffin has hit the fourth man in our hole on his outstretched arm. He tries to tear off his gas-mask with the other hand. Kropp seizes him just in time, twists the hand sharply behind his back and holds it fast.

Kat and I proceed to free the wounded arm. The coffin lid is 170 loose and bursts open, we are easily able to pull it off, we toss the corpse out, it slides to the bottom of the shell-hole, then we try to loosen the under-part.

Fortunately the man swoons and Kropp is able to help us. We no longer have to be careful, but work away till the coffin gives with a sigh before the spade that we have dug in under it.

It has grown lighter. Kat takes a piece of the lid, places it under the shattered arm, and we wrap all our bandages round it. For the moment we can do no more.

Inside the gas-mask my head booms and roars—it is nigh 180 bursting. My lungs are tight, they breathe always the same hot, used-up air, the veins on my temples are swollen, I feel I am suffocating.

A grey light filters through to us. I climb out over the edge of the shell-hole. In the dirty twilight lies a leg torn clean off; the boot is quite whole, I take that all in at a glance. Now someone stands up a few yards distant. I polish the windows, in my excitement they are immediately dimmed again, I peer through them, the man there no longer wears his mask.

I wait some seconds—he has not collapsed—he looks 190 around and makes a few paces—rattling in my throat I tear my mask off too and fall down, the air streams into me like cold water, my eyes are bursting, the wave sweeps over me and extinguishes me. . . .

Ernst In Germany, World War I brought impassioned protests from many visual artists. One of the most outspoken was Max Ernst (1891–1976), whose career flowered in the Dada and Surrealist movements. Shortly after the war, Ernst began to create unsettling visual fantasies assembled from bits of photographs and prints that he cut from magazines, books, and newspapers. In the collage-painting Two Ambiguous Figures (Figure 34.2), he combined the paraphernalia of modern warfare with the equipment of the scientist’s laboratory.

Ernst’s machinelike monsters are suspiciously reminis- cent of the gas-masked soldiers that he encountered during his four-year stint in the German infantry. Sadly enough, Ernst’s demons have become prophetic icons of modern warfare. Poison gas, used by the Iraqis in the 1980s war

BK6_001-173.indd 58BK6_001-173.indd 58 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

59

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

United States in the 1930s, where he eventually became an American citizen.

Léger Fernand Léger’s art (1881–1955) is usually classed with that of the Cubists, but it was the French artist’s wartime experience that actually shaped his long and productive career. During his four years on the front, Léger came to appreciate both the visual eloquence of modern machinery and the common humanity of the working-class soldiers with whom he shared the trenches. “Dazzled” (as he put it) by the breech of a 75-millimetre gun as it stood in the sun- light, Léger discovered similar kinds of beauty in ordinary human beings and in everyday objects—“the pots and pans on the white wall of your kitchen.” “I invent images from machines,” he claimed. The anonymity of urban life and the cold monumentality of the city—gray, hard, and sleek—became major themes for Léger in the postwar years. This “mechanical” aesthetic is visible in his painting Three Women (Figure 34.4). Robust and robotic, the near- identical nudes (and their cat) share a common, austere geometry.

Figure 34.3 GEORGE GROSZ, Fit for Active Service, 1916–1917. Pen and brush and ink on paper, 20 � 143⁄8 in. Grosz delighted in mocking the corrupt “fat cats” of Weimar society. At the top of this drawing, he shows factory chimneys spewing smoke that polluted the already tainted political environment of his native Berlin.

411Volume2

Figure 34.4 FERNAND LÉGER, Three Women (Le Grand Déjeuner), 1921. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 1⁄2 in. � 8 ft. 3 in. Sturdy women share the objectlike quality of a breakfast still life. “I have made use of the machine as others have used the nude body or the still life,” explained Léger.

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 411

BK6_001-173.indd 59BK6_001-173.indd 59 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

60

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

The Russian Revolution

Experimental Film

412 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2412

One of the last of the European powers to become industrialized, Russia entered World War I in 1914 under the leadership of Tzar Nicholas II (1868–1918). Russian involvement in the war, compounded by problems of government corruption and a weak and essentially agrarian economy, reduced the nation to desperate straits. Within a single year, the Russian army lost over one million men; a million more soldiers deserted. Food and fuel shortages threatened the entire civilian population. By 1917, a full-scale revolution was underway: strikes and riots broke out in the cities, while in the countryside peas- ants seized the lands of their aristocratic landlords. The revolution of 1917 forced the abdication of the tzar and ushered in a new regime, which, in turn, was seized by members of the Russian socialist party under the leadership of the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924).

Between 1917 and 1921, by means of shrewd political manipulation and a reign of terror conducted by the Red Army and the secret police, Lenin installed the left-wing faction of the Marxist socialists—the Bolsheviks—as the party that would govern a nation of more than 150 million people. Tailoring Marxist ideas to the needs of revolution- ary Russia, Lenin became the architect of Soviet communism.

In his treatise Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin followed Marx in describing imperialism as an

expression of the capitalist effort to monopolize raw materi- als and markets throughout the world. He agreed that a “dic- tatorship of the proletariat” was the first step in liberating the workers from bourgeois suppression. While condemning the state as “the organ of class domination,” he projected the transition to a classless society in a series of phases, which he outlined in the influential pamphlet “The State and Revolution” (1917). According to Lenin, in the first phase of communist society (generally called socialism), private property would be converted into property held in common and the means of production and distribution would belong to the whole of society. Every member of society would per- form a type of labor and each would be entitled to a “quan- tity of products” (drawn from public warehouses) that corresponded to his or her “quantity of work.” (A favorite

Fernand Léger produced one of the earliest and most influential abstract films in the history of motion pictures. Developed in collaboration with the American journalist Dudley Murphy, Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet, 1923–1924) puts into motion a series of abstract shapes and mundane objects (such as bottles and kitchen utensils), which, interspersed with human elements, convey a playful but dehumanized sense of everyday experience. The rhythms and juxtapositions of the images suggest—without any narrative—the notion of modern life as mechanized, routine, standardized, and impersonal. The repeated image of a laundry woman, for instance, alternating with that of a rotating machine part, plays on the associative qualities of visual motifs in ways that would influence filmmakers for decades.

Figure 34.5 A.I. STRAKHOV, Emancipated Women Build Socialism! 8th March, Day of the Liberation of Women, 1920. Colored lithograph, 3 ft. 61⁄2 in. � 263⁄4 in. Strong, simple forms, flat, bright colors, and short, easily memorized texts were the main characteristics of the Bolshevik political posters produced in the early decades of the twentieth century.

BK6_001-173.indd 60BK6_001-173.indd 60 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

The Great Depression and the American Scene

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

61

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 413

Lenin slogan ran, “He who does not work does not eat.”) In the first phase of communism, the socialist state prevailed. As Lenin explained, “a form of state is still necessary, which, while maintaining public ownership of the means of produc- tion, would preserve the equality of labor and equality in the distribution of products.”

In the second phase of communism, however, the state would disappear altogether:

The state will be able to wither away completely when society has realized the rule: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs,” i.e., when people have become accustomed to observe the fundamental rules of social life, and their labor is so productive that they voluntarily work according to their ability. . . . There will then be no need for any exact calculation by society of the quantity of products to be distributed to each of its members; each will take freely according to his needs.

Lenin was aware that such a social order might be deemed “a pure Utopia”; yet, idealistically, he anticipated the victory of communist ideals throughout the world. The reality was otherwise. In early twentieth-century Russia, the Bolsheviks created a dictatorship over rather than of the proletariat. In 1918, when the Constituent Assembly refused to approve Bolshevik power, Lenin dissolved the assembly. (In free elections Lenin’s party received less than a quarter of one percent of the vote.) He then eliminated all other parties and consolidated the Communist Party in the hands of five men—an elite committee called the Politburo, which Lenin himself chaired. Russia was renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in 1922, and in 1924 the constitution estab- lished a sovereign Congress of Soviets. But this body was actually governed by the leadership of the Communist Party, which maintained absolute authority well after Lenin’s death.*

The Communist Party established the first totalitarian regime of the twentieth century. Totalitarianism subordi- nated the life of the individual to the needs of the state. Through strict control of political, economic, and cultural life, and by means of coercive measures such as censorship and terrorism, Soviet communists persecuted those whose activities they deemed threatening to the state. Using edu- cational propaganda and the state-run media, they worked tirelessly to indoctrinate Soviet citizens with the virtues of communism.

Under the rule of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), who took control of the communist bureaucracy in 1926, the Soviets launched vast programs of industrialization and agricultur- al collectivization (the transformation of private farms into government-run units) that demanded heroic sacrifice among the Soviet people. Peasants worked long hours on state-controlled farms, earning a bare subsistence wage.

Stalin crushed all opposition: his secret police “purged” the state of dissidents, who were either imprisoned, exiled to gulags (labor camps), or executed. Between 1928 and 1938, the combination of severe famine and Stalin’s inhuman policies (later known as “the great terror”) took the lives of fifteen to twenty million Russians.

Communism enforced totalitarian control over all aspects of cultural expression. In 1934, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers officially approved the style of socialist realism in the arts. It condemned all manifestations of “Modernism” (from Cubist painting to hot jazz) as “bour- geois decadence.” The congress called upon Soviet artists to create “a true, historically concrete portrayal of reality in its revolutionary development.” Artists—including Malevich and the pioneer Russian constructivists—were instructed to communicate simply and directly, to shun all forms of decadent (that is, modern) Western art, and to describe only the positive aspects of socialist society. In realistically conceived posters, the new Soviet man and woman were portrayed earnestly operating tractors or running factory machinery (Figure 34.5). Thus the arts served to reinforce in the public mind the ideological benefits of communism. Socialist realism and the philosophy of art as mass propa- ganda lent support to almost every totalitarian regime of the twentieth century.

World War I left Europe devastat- ed, and massive economic prob- lems burdened both the Central Powers and the Allied nations. In the three years following the war,

world industrial production declined by more than a third, prices dropped sharply, and over thirty million people lost their jobs. The United States emerged from the war as the great creditor nation, but its economy was inextricably tied to world conditions. Following the inevitable crash of inflated stock prices in 1929, a growing paralysis swept through the American economy that developed into the Great Depression—a world crisis that lasted until the 1940s.

Literature The Great Depression inspired literary descriptions of eco- nomic oppression and misery that were often as much social documents as fictional narratives. The most memo- rable of these is the American novel The Grapes of Wrath, written in 1939 by John Steinbeck (1902–1968). The story recounts the odyssey of a family of Oklahoma migrant farmers who make their way to California in search of a living. In straightforward and photographically detailed prose, Steinbeck describes courageous encounters with starvation, injustice, and sheer evil. Like the soldiers in Remarque’s regiment, the members of the Joad family (and especially the matriarch, Ma Joad) display heroism in sheer survival.

413Volume2

* The Communist Party ceased to rule upon the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

BK6_001-173.indd 61BK6_001-173.indd 61 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

62

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

414 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2414

The Grapes of Wrath is an example of Social Realism, a style that presents socially significant subject matter in an objec- tive and lifelike manner. Not to be confused with socialist realism, which operated to glorify the socialist state, Social Realism was a vehicle of criticism and political protest. A writer, declared Steinbeck, is “the watchdog of society”; he must “set down his time as nearly as he can understand it.”

The Visual Arts During the Depression, Social Realism also dominated America’s visual arts. In opposition to Modernism, which sacrificed subject matter to formal abstraction, Social Realism made use of recognizable imagery that communi- cated the concerns of the masses. The Missouri-born Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) devoted his career to depicting scenes that called into question the political and

Figure 34.6 THOMAS HART BENTON, City Activities with Dance Hall, from the mural series America Today, 1930. Distemper and egg tempera on gessoed linen with oil glaze, 7 ft. 8 in. � 11 ft. 21⁄2 in. Benton’s America Today murals are set in the Prohibition Era: effective January 16, 1920, the eighteenth amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Unpopular and unenforceable, the amendment was repealed in 1933.

Elizabeth Pollock, wife of

Benton’s student

whiskey (illicit at the time), and

shot glass

woman reading cinema handbill

Jazz Age dance hall

beer, bootlegged during Prohibition

ticker-tape machine and Wall Street traders

trapeze artist and circus performers

cigarettes advertisement

soda “jerk” in drugstore ice-cream parlor

sign above books alluding to popular mystery novels of “S. S. Van Dine”

Benton with paintbrush and highball, toasting Director of New School for Social Research who commissioned the murals

Benton’s wife and son with Caroline Pratt, progressive educator and founder of the first nursery school in America

homemade still for making

“bathtub gin”

BK6_001-173.indd 62BK6_001-173.indd 62 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

63

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

Science and Technology

415Volume2

economic policies leading to the Great Depression. Benton aimed to commemorate “true” American values by immor- talizing the lives of ordinary men and women, whom he pictured as rugged and energetic. In three sets of public murals completed between 1930 and 1933, he created an extraordinary pictorial history of the United States. He por- trayed steelworking, mining, farming, and other working- class activities, as well as bootlegging, gospel singing, crap shooting, and a wide variety of essentially familiar pastimes.

Benton’s City Activities, one section from America Today, a larger set of murals depicting American life during the Prohibition era, is a montage of “vignettes” from such pop- ular urban entertainments as the circus, the movie theater, and the dance hall (Figure 34.6). A ticker-tape machine— the symbol of Wall Street commercialism and American greed—appears in the upper part of the mural; it is bal- anced in the lower foreground by another instrument of commercialism—bootlegging equipment. Benton, who appears with paintbrush in hand in the lower right of the painting, admired the purity of Midwestern rural life. His assessment of America’s urban centers as “nothing but coffins for living and thinking” is powerfully conveyed in America Today. In Benton’s hands the mural was not mere decoration. It was a major form of public art, one that

revealed ordinary American life as vividly as Renaissance murals mirrored the elitist world of sixteenth-century Italy.

Mexico’s Mural Renaissance Benton drew inspiration from the work of two great Mexican muralists: José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957). Their paintings, character- ized by simple yet powerful forms and bold colors, capture the vitality and the futility of the Mexican Revolution— one of many militant efforts at reforming economic and social conditions in Central and South America during the first half of the twentieth century (Figure 34.7).

Figure 34.7 DIEGO RIVERA, Liberation of the Peon, 1931. Fresco, 6 ft. 2 in. � 7 ft. 11 in. Rivera helped to launch Mexico’s Mural Renaissance. His large, simplified figures and bold colors look back to Maya relief sculptures and frescoes.

1927 the first television transmission is viewed in America

1930 the British invent a workable jet engine 1938 the Germans split the atom to achieve

nuclear fission 1939 British scientists produce pure penicillin 1945 the first experimental atomic bomb is exploded

at Alamogordo, New Mexico

BK6_001-173.indd 63BK6_001-173.indd 63 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

64

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Totalitarianism and World War II

416 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2416

The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was particularly significant as the first social revolution of the century to engage the active participation of great masses of peasants and urban workers. United under the banner of “Land Liberty,” Mexico’s farmers and laborers opposed the promo- tion of industry and the reallocation of farmland at their expense. Rivera championed their cause in murals that fea- tured sympathetic depictions of peasants, often inspired by the art of their Maya and Aztec forebears. By emphasizing the Amerindian aspect of Mexico’s history, Rivera’s art— like the revolution itself—helped to effect a change in Mexico’s self-image.

Photography During the Great Depression, photography was pressed into political service. United States federal agencies sponsored a program to provide a permanent record of eco- nomic and social conditions in rural America. Migration and rural poverty—bread lines, beggars, and the shanty towns of America’s impoverished classes—became the pri- mary subjects of documentary photography. The New York photographer Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) traveled across the country to record the conditions of destitute farmers who had fled the Midwestern dust bowl for the fields of California. Migrant Mother (Figure 34.8), which Lange photographed at a farm camp in Nipomo, California, is the portrait of a gaunt thirty-two-year-old woman who had become the sole supporter of her six chil- dren. Forced to sell her last possessions for food, the anx- ious but unconquerable heroine in this photograph might have stepped out of the pages of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Lange’s moving image reaches beyond a specific time and place to universalize the twin evils of poverty and oppression.

In Germany, widespread discon- tent and turmoil followed the combined effects of the Great Depression and the humiliating peace terms dictated by the victo-

rious Allies. Crippling debts forced German banks to close in 1931, and at the height of the Depression only one-third of all Germany’s workers were fully employed. In the wake of these conditions, the young ideologue Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) rose to power. By 1933, Hitler was chancellor of Germany and the leader (in German, Führer) of the National Socialist German Workers’ party (the Nazi party), which would lead Germany again into a world war.

A fanatic racist, Hitler shaped the Nazi platform. He blamed Germany’s ills on the nation’s internal “enemies,” whom he identified as Jews, Marxists, bourgeois liberals, and “social deviates.” Hitler promised to “purify” the German state of its “threatening” minorities and rebuild the coun- try into a mighty empire. He manipulated public opinion by using all available means of propaganda—especially the radio, which brought his voice into every German home.

In his autobiographical work Mein Kampf (My Struggle), published in 1925, Hitler set forth a misguided theory of “Aryan racial superiority” that would inspire some of the most malevolent episodes in the history of humankind, including genocide: the systematic extermination of mil- lions of Jews, along with thousands of Roman Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities. Justifying his racist ideology, he wrote:

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted to it by the creator of the universe.

Mein Kampf exalted the totalitarian state as “the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.” “The state is a means to an end,” insisted Hitler. “Its end lies in the preservation and advancement of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures.”

Less than twenty years after the close of World War I the second, even more devastating, world war threatened. The conditions that contributed to the outbreak of World War II included the failure of the peace settlement that had ended World War I and the undiminished growth of nationalism and militarism. But the specific event that ini- tiated a renewal of hostilities was Hitler’s military advance into Poland in 1939.

Figure 34.8 DOROTHEA LANGE, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936. Gelatin-silver print. Migrant Mother has been hailed as the Depression era equivalent of the medieval Madonna: an image of protective anguish and despair.

BK6_001-173.indd 64BK6_001-173.indd 64 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

* *

*

Tagus

Ebro

Loire

Seine

Po Danube

Rh in

e

Elbe

Oder

Do n

Volga

Suez Canal

Gibraltar

Tangier

Casablanca Oran

Algiers Bizerte

Nice Marseilles

Vichy

Dieppe

London

Coventry

Brussels

Trier

Tunis

Palermo

Anzio Rome

Salerno Monte Cassino

Sofia

Belgrade Bucharest

Budapest Berchtesgaden

Munich Vienna

Prague Stuttgart Frankfurt

Cologne

Potsdam

Hamburg Danzig

Berlin Warsaw

Königsberg

Moscow

Stalingrad

Yalta Sevestapol

Ankara

Tobruk

A LB

A N

IA

IRELAND

PO RT

U G

AL

SPAIN

FRENCH MOROCCO TUNISIA

SARDINIA

CORSICA

FRANCE SWITZERLAND

BELGIUM

NETHERLANDS

DENMARK

NORTH SEA

GREAT BRITAIN

ALGERIA

LIBYA

SICILY

ITALY

GREECE

BULGARIA YUGOSLAVIA

ROMANIA HUNGARY AUSTRIA

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

GERMANY

POLAND

E. PRUSSIA

LITHUANIA

LATVIA

ESTONIA

NORWAY SWEDEN

FINLAND

Leningrad

U . S . S . R .

SYRIA

TURKEY

EGYPT

PALESTINE TRANS-JORDAN

ENGLISH CHANNEL ATLANTIC OCEAN

M E D I T E R R A N E A N S E A

B L A C K S

E A

19 43

19 44

1945

1945 19 44

194 2

19 44

1944

1943

1942

19 42

1944

194 4

1945

194 3

Sinking of “The Bismarck”

1941

Dunkirk 1940

1944

El Alamein 1942

Key

Allies

Axis powers at the outbreak of war Greatest area of Axis military power Allies occupied by Axis military power Major battle *

N

E W

S

0 500 miles

500 kilometers0

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

65

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

Once again, two opposing alliances were formed: Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary comprised the Axis powers (the term describing the imaginary line between Rome and Berlin), while France and Britain and, in 1941, the United States and the Soviet Union, constituted the major Allied forces. Germany joined forces with totalitari- an regimes in Italy (under Benito Mussolini) and in Spain (under General Francisco Franco), and the hostilities quickly spread into North Africa, the Balkans, and else- where. The fighting that took place during the three-year civil war in Spain (1936–1939) and in the German attack on the Netherlands in 1940 anticipated the merciless aspects of total war. In Spain, Nazi dive-bombers destroyed whole cities, while in the Netherlands, German tanks, parachute troops, and artillery overran the country in less than a week. The tempo of death was quickened as German air power attacked both military and civilian targets. France fell to Germany in 1940, and Britain became the target of systematic German bombing raids. At the same time, violating a Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, only to suffer massive defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 (Map 34.2).

The United States, though supportive of the Allies, again tried to hold fast to its policy of “benevolent neutral- ity.” It was brought into the war nevertheless by Japan, which had risen rapidly to power in the late nineteenth century. Japan had defeated the Russians in the Russo– Japanese War of 1904. The small nation had successfully invaded Manchuria in 1931 and established a foothold in China and Southeast Asia. In December 1941, in opposi- tion to United States efforts at restricting Japanese trade, the Japanese naval air service dropped bombs on the American air base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States, declaring war on Japan, joined the twenty-five other nations that opposed the Axis powers and sent combat forces to fight in both Europe and the Pacific.

The war against Japan was essentially a naval war, but it involved land and air attacks as well. Its terrible climax was America’s attack on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August of 1945. The bombing, which annihilated over 120,000 people (mostly civilians) and forced the Japanese to surrender within a matter of days, ushered in the atomic age. Just months before, as German forces had given way to Allied assaults on all fronts, Hitler

Map 34.2 World War II: The Defeat of the Axis, 1942–1945.

417Volume2

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 417

BK6_001-173.indd 65BK6_001-173.indd 65 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

66

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

READING 34.5

Q How are the images of birth and death conflated by Jarrell?

READING 34.6

Q What effects are achieved by verbal compression?

418 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2418

had committed suicide. World War II came to a close with the surrender of both Germany and Japan in 1945.

World War II Poetry Around the globe World War II poetry carried to new extremes the sentiments of despair and futility. The American poet and critic Randall Jarrell (1914–1965), who served in the US Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1946, condemned military combat as dehumanizing and degrad- ing. In the short poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” a World War II airman, speaking from beyond the grave, recounts his fatal experience as an air force gun- ner. Encased in the Plexiglas bubble dome of an airplane ball turret—like an infant in his mother’s womb—he “wakes” to “black flak” and dies; the startling image of birth in death conflates dreaming and waking. Jarrell observed that modern combat, fueled by sophisticated technical instruments, neither fostered pride nor affirmed human nobility. Rather, such combat turned the soldier into a technician and an instrument of war. It robbed him of personal identity and reduced him to the level of an object—a thing to be washed out by a high-pressure steam hose. The note to the title of the poem was provided by the poet himself.

Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”1 (1945)

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.2

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

In Japan, lamentation preceded rage. The haiku, the light verse form that had traditionally enshrined such images as cherry blossoms and spring rain, now became the instru- ment by which Japanese poets evoked the presence of death. Kato Shuson (1905–1993) introduced the three haikus reproduced below with the following words: “In the middle of the night there was a heavy air raid. Carrying my sick brother on my back I wandered in the flames with my wife in search of our children.”

Shuson’s haikus (ca. 1945)

Hi no oku ni In the depths of the flames Botan kuzururu I saw how a peony Sama wo mitsu Crumbles to pieces.

—– ◆ –—

Kogarashi ya Cold winter storm— Shōdo no kinko A safe-door in a burnt-out site Fukinarasu Creaking in the wind.

—– ◆ –—

Fuyu kamome The winter sea gulls— Sei no ie nashi In life without a house, Shi no haka nashi In death without a grave.

World War II Fiction As in the poetry of Jarrell, the novels of World War II were characterized by nihilism and resignation, their heroes robbed of reason and innocence. In From Here to Eternity (1951) by James Jones (1921–1977) and The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer (1923–2007), war makes men and machines interchangeable—the brutality of total war dehumanizes its heroes. Mailer’s raw, naturalistic nov- els, which are peppered with the four-letter words that characterize so much modern fiction, portray a culture dominated by violence and sexuality. Stylistically, Mailer often deviated from the traditional beginning-middle-and- end narrative format, using instead such cinematic tech- niques as flashback.

This episodic technique also prevails in the novels of Joseph Heller (1923–1999), Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), and other gallows humor writers. “Gallows” (or “black”) humor is a form of literary satire that mocks modern life by calling attention to situations that seem too ghastly or too absurd to be true. Such fiction describes the grotesque and the macabre in the passionless and noncha- lant manner of a contemporary newspaper account. Like an elaborate hate joke, the gallows humor novel provokes helpless laughter at what is hideous and awful. Modern war, according to these humorists, is the greatest of all hate jokes: dominated by bureaucratic capriciousness and mechanized destruction, it is an enterprise that has no victors, only victims.

Heller’s Catch-22 (1955), one of the most popular gallows humor novels to emerge from World War II, marks the shift from the realistic description of modern warfare (characteristic of the novels of Remarque, Jones, and Mailer) to its savage satirization. Heller based the events of Catch-22 on his own experiences as an air force bombardier in World War II. The novel takes place on an air base off the coast of Italy, but its plot is less concerned with the events of the war than with the dehumanizing operations of the vast military bureaucracy that runs the war. Heller describes this bureaucracy as symbolic of “the humbug, hypocrisy, cruelty and sheer stupidity of our mass society.” His rendering of the classic armed forces

1 “A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24 and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short, small man. When this gunner traced with his machine-guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upside-down in his little sphere, he looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose.”

2 The airman’s fur-lined flight jacket.

BK6_001-173.indd 66BK6_001-173.indd 66 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

READING 34.7

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

67

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 419

condolence form-letter satirizes the impersonal character of modern war and provides a brief example of his biting style:

Dear Mrs.,/Mr.,/Miss,/or Mr. and Mrs.— — —: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband,/son,/father,/or brother was killed,/wounded,/or reported missing in action.

Catch-22 is a caustic blend of nihilism and forced cheerful- ness. The characters in the novel—including a navigator who has no sense of direction and an aviator who bombs his own air base for commercial advantage— operate at the mercy of a depersonalizing system. As they try their best to preserve their identity and their sanity, they become the enemies of the very authorities that sent them to war.

Responses to Totalitarianism While total war became a compelling theme in twentieth- century fiction, so too did totalitarianism, especially as it was described by those who had experienced it first-hand. Until Stalin’s death in 1953, a reign of terror prevailed in the Soviet Union. As many found out, the slightest devia- tion from orthodox Marxist-Stalinist decorum resulted in imprisonment, slave labor, or execution. Between 1929 and 1953 some eighteen million people were sent to prison camps and another six million were exiled to remote parts of the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) served in the Russian army during World War II, and although he had twice received recognition for bravery in combat, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 for veiled anti- Stalinist comments that he had made in a letter to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment, spending half the term in a gulag in Siberia and the other half teach- ing mathematics in a Moscow prison. His Siberian experi- ence provided the eyewitness material for his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). It was fol- lowed in 1973–1976 by The Gulag Archipelago, a documen- tary description of Soviet prison life. These dispassionate accounts of the grim conditions of totalitarianism are sear- ing indictments of inhumanity, and testaments to the hero- ism of the victims of Soviet political oppression.

Like Stalin, Hitler wielded unlimited and often ruth- less authority. He destroyed democratic institutions in Germany, condemned avant-garde art, modern architec- ture, atonal music, and jazz as “degenerate,” attacked Einstein’s theories as “Jewish physics,” and proceeded to eliminate—by means of the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police)—all opposition to his program of mass conformity. In 1933, over 35,000 Germans died either by suicide or from “unexplained causes.” Over the next ten years, con- centration camps arose in Austria, Poland, and Germany to house Hitler’s “impure” minorities. It is estimated that six million Jews and five million non-Jews were put to death in Nazi gas chambers—a hideous episode in European history known as the Holocaust.

In Germany, the voices of actual witnesses to the atroc- ities of the Holocaust were for the most part silenced by

death, but drawings by camp inmates and documentary photographs taken just after the war (see Figure 34.11) provide shocking visual evidence of modern barbarism. One of the most eloquent survivors of the Holocaust is the writer Elie Wiesel (b. 1928), recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. At the age of fifteen, Wiesel, a Romanian Jew, was shipped with his entire family to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. From there the family was split up, and Wiesel and his father were sent to a labor camp in Buchenwald, Germany, where the youth saw his father and hundreds of others killed by the Nazis. Liberated in 1945, Wiesel transmuted the traumatic experiences of his childhood into prose. “Auschwitz,” wrote Wiesel, “represents the negation and failure of human progress: it negates the human design and casts doubts on its validity.” Night, Wiesel’s autobiographi- cal record of the Nazi terrors, is a graphic account of Hitler’s barbarism. The brief excerpt that follows reveals the anguish Wiesel and other Jews experienced in con- fronting what appeared to be God’s silence in the face of brutal injustice.

From Wiesel’s Night (1958) One day, the electric power station at Buna was blown up. The 1 Gestapo, summoned to the spot, suspected sabotage. They found a trail. It eventually led to the Dutch Oberkapo.1 And there, after a search, they found an important stock of arms.

The Oberkapo was arrested immediately. He was tortured for a period of weeks, but in vain. He would not give a single name. He was transferred to Auschwitz. We never heard of him again.

But his little servant had been left behind in the camp in prison. Also put to torture, he too would not speak. Then the SS2 sentenced him to death, with two other prisoners who had 10 been discovered with arms.

One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all round us, machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains—and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, 20 biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

This time the Lagerkapo3 refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the

nooses. “Long live liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped 30

1 The foreman of the prisoners, selected from among them by the Nazis.

2 A special police force that operated the camps. 3 The prisoner who acted as foreman of the warehouse.

419Volume2BK6_001-173.indd 67BK6_001-173.indd 67 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

68

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Q What similarities and differences do you detect between the circumstances described here and those described by Remarque (Reading 34.4)?

Q How do the styles of Wiesel and Remarque compare?

The Visual Arts in the War Era

420 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2420

over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun

was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice

was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!” Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer

alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive. . . .

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling 40 between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this

gallows. . . .” That night the soup tasted of corpses. . . . 50

Photojournalism The realities of World War II were recorded by an international array of photojournalists. One of the most gifted was Lee Miller (1907–1977), an American debutante who became the first female wartime photojournalist and an early witness to the horrors of the German con- centration camps (Figure 34.9). The American photographer Robert Capa (1897–1954) produced notable pictures of World War II paratroopers, and the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) immortalized the plight of war-torn Europe in hun- dreds of aesthetically compelling social realist photographs.

In the Soviet Union, photogra- phy came under the totalitarian knife, as Stalin’s propagandists carefully excised from official photographs unseemly images of political brutality. The “remaking” of history via photomanipulation—

a technique that would become popular among American filmmakers at the end of the century—had its ignoble beginnings in the war era.

Picasso’s Guernica On the afternoon of April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) that pitted republican forces against the Fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, the German air force (in league with the Spanish Fascists) dropped incendiary bombs on Guernica, a small Basque market town in northeast Spain. During three and a half hours of bombing, the town was leveled and hundreds of people were killed. News of the event—the world’s first aerial bombardment of a civilian target—reached Paris, where the horrified Pablo Picasso read illustrated newspaper accounts of the attack as the death toll mounted. Earlier in the year, the artist had been invited to contribute a paint- ing for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World’s Fair. The bombing of Guernica provided him with inspiration for the huge mural that would become the twentieth century’s most memorable antiwar image (see Figure 34.10).

More powerful than any literary description, Guernica captures the grim brutality and suffering of the wartime era. For the painting, as wide as the 26 feet of his studio wall, Picasso chose monochromatic tones—the ashen grays of incineration—which also call to mind the documentary media of mass communication: newspapers, photographs, and film. However, Guernica is far from documentary. Its

Figure 34.9 LEE MILLER, Buchenwald, Germany, 30 April 1945. Photograph.

BK6_001-173.indd 68BK6_001-173.indd 68 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

M A K I N G C O N N E C T I O N S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

69

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

flat, abstract figures and airless spatial field, distilled from the language of Cubism, provide a sharp contrast with the Social Realist style that dominated much of the art pro- duced in Europe and America between the wars. Distinct from a true-to-life rendering, the painting conflates the actual event of the bombing with an assortment of images drawn from Picasso’s personal pictorial vocabulary, espe- cially those of the Spanish bullfight, the ancient ritual of sacrificial death that intrigued the artist. The bull, at once hero and victim of the traditional combat, stands at the left of the shallow stage; the horse, whose body bears the gap- ing wound of a spear, rears its head in an agonized cry, its role in this massacre no less devastating than the one it

often plays in the bullring, when attacked by the bull itself. Four women—one carrying a dead infant, a second holding a lamp, a third consumed in the flames of a burning build- ing—issue voiceless screams configured to repeat that of the wounded horse. The dead warrior at the bottom of the composition—actually a broken statue—makes reference to war’s corrupting effect on the artifacts of high culture, while mocking the militant idealism represented by tradi- tional war monuments. By the unique conjunction of pow- erful images—a screaming woman, a dead baby, a severed arm, a victimized animal—Picasso created a universal icon for the inhuman atrocities of war, one that has made good his claim that art is “a weapon against the enemy.”

Picasso regarded himself as heir to the historical giants of world art, and especially those who came from his own native Spain. Familiar with Goya’s painting, The Third of May, 1808 (Figure 34.11), which immortalizes the massacre of Madrid’s citizens by the invading forces of France, he expropriated some of its most effective devices, such as the triangular beam of light that unifies the composition and sharp light/dark contrasts that create dramatic tension. In the image of the burning woman in Guernica (Figure 34.10), Picasso makes reference to the unforgettable figure of Goya’s protagonist, who, facing the French firing squad, flings his arms above his head in a gesture of rage and despair. Since the return of Guernica to Spain in 1981, it has become, like Goya’s Third of May, a national monument.

Figure 34.11 FRANCISCO GOYA (below), The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 1814. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 6 in. � 10 ft. 4 in.

Figure 34.10 PABLO PICASSO (above), Guernica, 1937. Oil on canvas, 11 ft. 51⁄2 in. � 25 ft. 53⁄4 in.

421Volume2

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 421

BK6_001-173.indd 69BK6_001-173.indd 69 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

70

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Film in the War Era

422 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2422

Figure 34.12 SERGEI M. EISENSTEIN, The Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Film stills from Act IV, “The Odessa Steps Massacre.” A woman, whose face will be slashed by a soldier, watches the careening baby carriage as it rolls down the steps. The Odessa Steps sequence, whose rapidly increasing tempo evokes apprehension and terror, is an ingenious piece of editing that has been imitated with great frequency by modern filmmakers.

Eisenstein

Film provided a permanent historical record of the turbulent military and political events of the early twentieth century. It also became an effective medium of political propaganda. In Russia, Lenin envisioned film as an invaluable means of spreading the ideals of communism. Following the Russian Revolution, he nationalized the fledgling motion-picture industry. In the hands of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), film operated both as a vehicle for political persuasion and as a fine art. He shaped the social and artistic potential of cinema by combining realistic narrative with symbolic imagery. In The Battleship Potemkin (1925), his silent film masterpiece, Eisenstein told the story of a 1905 mutiny led by the crew of a Russian naval vessel, and the subsequent massacre of their sympathizers—the citizens of Odessa. While this singular event did not actually occur, Eisenstein drew on similar brutalities described in the Russian press. To recreate the effect of an on-the-spot documentary, he made use of montage, the cinematic technique that depends on a rapid succession of images. The so-called “Odessa Steps sequence” at the end of the film interposes 155 separate images in less than five minutes; the footage shows the advancing tzarist soldiers attacking their civilian victims, including a mother who is killed trying to save her infant in a baby carriage that slowly careens down a broad flight of stairs (Figure 34.12).

Alternating close-ups (see Figure 34.1) and long shots, shots from below and above, fixed shots and traveling shots, the Odessa Steps sequence gave the fictional massacre of Odessa’s civilian victims unprecedented dramatic authenticity. Two years later, in 1927, Eisenstein made the Russian Revolution itself the subject of the film Ten Days That Shook the World. Both in his silent movies and in those he made later with sound, Eisenstein developed techniques that drew the viewer into the space of the film. He deliberately cut off parts of faces to bring attention to the eyes, played one shot off the next to build a conflicting and often discontinuous sequence, and devised visual angles that, in true constructivist fashion, produced startling asymmetrical abstractions. The masterpiece of Eisenstein’s post-silent film career was Alexander Nevsky (1938), a film that exalted the thirteenth- century Russian prince who defended the motherland against the onslaught of the Teutonic Knights. Here Eisenstein linked the musical score (composed by Sergei Prokofiev) to the pacing of the cinematic action: specifically, to the compositional flow of individual shots in the visual sequence—a technique known as “vertical montage.” In place of the operatic crowd scenes of his earlier films, he framed the protagonist within landscapes and battle scenes that were as gloriously stylized as monumental paintings. Alexander Nevsky earned the approval of Joseph Stalin and the acclaim of the Russian people. It survives as a landmark in the history of inventive filmmaking.

BK6_001-173.indd 70BK6_001-173.indd 70 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

71

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 423

423Volume2

Riefenstahl

While Eisenstein used film to glorify the collective and individual heroism of the Soviet people, German filmmakers working for Hitler turned motion pictures into outright vehicles of state propaganda. The filmmaker and former actress Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) received unlimited state subsidies to produce the most famous propaganda film of all time, The Triumph of the Will (1934). She engaged a crew of 135 people to film the huge rallies and ceremonies staged by Hitler and the Nazi party, including their first meeting in Nuremberg. The Triumph of the Will is a synthesis of documentary fact and sheer artifice. Its bold camera angles and stark compositions seem in themselves totalitarian—witness the absolute symmetry and exacting conformity of the masses of troops that frame the tiny figures of Hitler and his compatriots at the Nuremberg rally (Figure 34.13).

Film in America

In America, film served to inform, to boost morale, and to propagandize for the Allied cause; but it also served as entertainment and escape. At the height of the Depression as well as during the war era millions of Americans flocked to movie theaters each week. While such prize-winning movies as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and From Here to Eternity (1953) were painfully realistic, numerous other films romanticized and glamorized the war. An exception to the standard war-movie fare was The Great Dictator (1940), which was directed by the multitalented British-born actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977). In this hilarious satire of Fascist dictatorship, Adolf Hitler (known in the film as Adenoid Hynkel and played by Chaplin) rises to power as head of the “Double Cross Party,” only to be arrested by his own troops, who mistake him for a Jewish barber.

Figure 34.13 LENI RIEFENSTAHL, The Triumph of the Will, 1934. Film still showing Himmler, Hitler, and Lutze framed by columns of people as they approach the memorial monument in Nuremberg, Germany.

BK6_001-173.indd 71BK6_001-173.indd 71 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

72

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Music in the War Era

424 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2424

Every totalitarian government in history has feared the power of music. In Nazi Germany, jazz was forbidden on the basis of its free and improvised style and its association with black musicians; in communist China, Beethoven’s music was banned as the sound of the independent spirit. In Soviet Russia, Lenin’s regime laid down the specific rule that composers write only music that “communicated” to the people. Atonality, associated with elitism and inscrutability, was to be avoided, along with other expres- sions of Western “decadence.” “Music,” observed Lenin, “is a means of unifying great masses of people.”

Shostakovich The career of the eminent Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) illustrates the challenges faced by Soviet composers in the time of Stalin. Enrolled at thir- teen in the Leningrad Conservatory, Shostakovich was the product of rigorous classical training. His compositions, including fifteen symphonies, fifteen string quartets, and numerous scores for ballet, opera, plays, and motion pic- tures, incorporate songlike melodies and insistent rhyth- mic repetition. They are essentially tonal, but they make dramatic use of dissonance. One of his first operas, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1934), was hailed by the Soviet press as a loyal expression of socialist ideology. However, within two years, Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, con- demned it as “antinarodnaya,” that is, “antipeople.” In 1941, the Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony was hailed as a celebration of the Soviet triumph against the Nazi inva- sion of Leningrad. Nevertheless, in 1948, it received harsh criticism for its “bourgeois formalism.” That same year, Shostakovich was denounced by the government and dis- missed from his posts at the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatories.

The fact that music rarely has meaning beyond sound itself worked, however, in the composer’s favor: passages featuring militaristic rhythms might be taken as a sign of militant triumph, but they might also be heard as a refer- ence to freedom from oppression. Only after 1979, when the memoirs of Shostakovich were smuggled out of the Soviet Union, did it become apparent that the composer intended the symphony as an attack on Stalin’s inhumani- ty toward his own people.

Prokofiev The career of the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) was equally turbulent. Permitted to leave Russia in 1918, he was persuaded to return in 1936. Defending Soviet principles, he proclaimed “. . . the com- poser . . . is in duty bound to serve man, the people. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art may con- sciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future.” In 1948, the Soviets nevertheless denounced Prokofiev’s music as “too modern”; and, along with Shostakovich, Prokofiev was relieved of his position at the Soviet music conservatories.

Prokofiev’s compositions, most of which reveal his pref- erence for classical form, are tonal and melodic, but they are boldly inventive in modulation and harmonic disso- nance. In his scores for the ballets Romeo and Juliet (1935) and Cinderella (1944), and in his cantata for the Eisenstein film Alexander Nevsky (1938), Prokofiev demonstrated a talent for driving rhythms, sprightly marches, and unex- pected, often whimsical shifts of tempo and melody. These features are found as well in his two modern-day classics: the witty Lieutenant Kije Suite (1934) and the symphonic fairy tale, Peter and the Wolf (1936).

Britten Twentieth-century composers were frequently moved to commemorate the horrors of war. The most monumental example of such music is the War Requiem (1963) written by the British composer Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) to accompany the consecration of England’s new Coventry Cathedral, built alongside the ruins of the fourteenth- century cathedral that had been virtually destroyed by German bombs in World War II. Britten was a master at setting text to music. In the War Requiem he juxtaposed the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead (the Latin Requiem Mass) with lines from the poems of Wilfred Owen. The latter convey the composer’s antiwar convic- tions. Britten’s imaginative union of sacred ritual and secular song calls for orchestra, chorus, boys’ chorus, and three soloists. Poignant in spirit and dramatic in effect, this oratorio may be seen as the musical analogue of Picasso’s Guernica.

Penderecki If it were possible to capture in music the agony of war, the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933) has come closest to doing so. His Threnody in Memory of the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) consists of violent torrents of dissonant, percussive sound, some of which is produced by beating on the bodies of the fifty-two stringed instruments for which the piece is scored. The ten-minute song of lamentation for the dead begins with a long, screaming tone produced by playing the highest pitches possible on the violins; it is followed by passages punctuated by tone clusters (groups of adjacent dissonant notes). The rapid shifts in densities, timbres, rhythms, and dynamics are jar- ring and disquieting—effects consistent with the subject matter of the piece.

Threnody was said to be the “anguished cry” that pro- claimed the birth of the musical avant-garde behind the Iron Curtain. Penderecki’s angry blurring of tones also characterizes his Dies Irae (1967), subtitled Oratorio Dedicated to the Memory of those Murdered at Auschwitz. Like Britten’s War Requiem, Penderecki’s composition draws on Christian liturgy—here the traditional hymn of Last Judgment (the “Day of Wrath”)—to convey a mood of darkness and despair. The Dies Irae, first performed on the grounds of a former concentration camp, is punctuated by clanking chains and piercing sirens. Harsh and abrasive, it remains a symbol of the Holocaust’s haunting impact.

BK6_001-173.indd 72BK6_001-173.indd 72 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

The Communist Revolution in China

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

73

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 425

Copland and the American Sound One of America’s finest twentieth-century composers, Aaron Copland (1900–1990) turned away from the horrors of war; however, just as the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev was rooted in Russian soil, so that of Copland drew nourishment from native American idioms. The New York composer spiced his largely tonal compositions with the simple harmonies of American folk songs, the clarity of Puritan hymns, and the lively and often syncopated rhythms of jazz and Mexican dance. In 1941, Copland advised American composers to find alternatives to the harsh and demanding serialism of their European col- leagues: “The new musical audiences will have to have music they can comprehend,” he insisted. “It must there- fore be simple and direct . . . Above all, it must be fresh in feeling.” Copland achieved these goals in all his composi- tions, especially in the ballet scores Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1940), and Appalachian Spring (1944).

Appalachian Spring, commissioned by the Martha Graham Dance Company, was originally called “Ballet for Martha.” The choreographer chose its title, which is based on the first line of a poem by the American writer, Hart Crane (1899–1932). (The “spring” in the title refers not to a season but to a source of water.) Graham’s ballet tells the story of a newly betrothed Pennsylvania frontier couple, who are welcomed to their new community by a revivalist preacher and his congregation. An orchestral suite for small chamber orchestra, it features five variations on the familiar Shaker song, “’Tis the Gift to Be Simple.” In directing an orchestral rehearsal for the piece in 1974, Copland urged, “Make it more American in spirit, in that the sentiment isn’t shown on the face.” Copland also com- posed for film, winning an Oscar in 1949 for his score for The Heiress. Like the murals of Thomas Hart Benton, Copland’s music wedded American themes to a vigorous and readily accessible language of form.

The history of totalitarianism is not confined to the West. In the course of the twentieth century, modern tyrants wiped out whole populations in parts of Cambodia,

Vietnam, Iraq, Africa, and elsewhere. Of all the Asian countries, however, China experienced the most dramatic changes. In 1900, less than 10 percent of the Chinese pop- ulation owned almost 80 percent of the land. Clamoring for reform, as well as for independence from foreign domi- nation, nationalist forces moved to redistribute land among the enormous peasant population. By 1911, the National People’s Party had overthrown the Manchu lead- ers (see chapter 21) and established a republican govern- ment. But the Nationalists failed to provide an efficient

425Volume2

program for land redistribution. Consequently, after 1937, they lost much of their popular support. Following World War II, the communist forces under the leadership of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) rose to power. In 1949 they formed the People’s Republic of China.

In China as in Russia, the Communist Party gained exclusive control of the government, with Mao serving as both chairman of the party and head of state. Mao called upon the great masses of citizens to work toward radical reform. “The theory of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is universally applicable,” wrote Mao. However, he added, “We should regard it not as a dogma, but as a guide to action.” A competent poet and scholar, Mao drew up the guidelines for the new society of China, a society that prac- ticed cooperative endeavor and self-discipline. These guidelines were published in 1963 as the Quotations from Chairman Mao. Mao’s “little red book” soon became the “bible” of the Chinese Revolution. On youth, Mao wrote, “The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed in you.” On women: “In order to build a great socialist society, it is of the utmost impor- tance to arouse the broad masses of women to join in pro- ductive activity. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in production.” And on the masses: “The masses have boundless creative power . . . the revolutionary war is a war of the masses; it can be waged only by mobiliz- ing the masses and relying on them.”

Mao’s ambitious reforms earned the support of the land- less masses, but his methods for achieving his goals struck at the foundations of traditional Chinese culture. He moved to replace the old order, and especially the Confucian veneration of the family, with new socialist val- ues that demanded devotion to the local economic unit— and ultimately to the state. To carry out his series of five-year plans for economic development in industry and agriculture, he instituted iron-handed totalitarian prac- tices, including indoctrination, exile, and repeated purges of the voices of opposition. Between 1949 and 1952, Mao authorized the execution of some two to five million peo- ple, including the wealthy landowners themselves.

Like the century’s other totalitarian leaders, Mao direct- ed writers to infuse their works with ideological content that celebrated the creative powers of the masses. To some extent, however, the movement for a “people’s literature” advanced reforms that already had been launched during the political revolution of 1911: at that time, traditional styles of writing, including the “book language” of the clas- sics, gave way to the language of common, vernacular speech. The new naturalistic style was strongly influenced by Western literature and journalism. Chinese writers responded enthusiastically to modern European novels, short stories, and psychological dramas—poets even imi- tated such Western forms as the sonnet.

In the visual arts, the influence of late nineteenth- century Western printmakers such as Käthe Kollwitz (see chapter 30), helped to shape the powerful realism of manySee Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.��

��

BK6_001-173.indd 73BK6_001-173.indd 73 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

74

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

L O O K I N G B A C K

Chronology

426 CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts

Volume2426

Total Wars • The twentieth century was molded in the crucible of total war

and totalitarianism. • World Wars I and II were more devastating in nature and effect

than any preceding wars in world history. They involved numerous nations, killed unprecedented numbers of civilians, and employed the weapons of modern technology: machine guns, poison gas, tanks, and finally, atomic bombs.

World War I Literature • Writers responded to total war and totalitarianism with rage,

disbelief, and compassion. • Bitter indictments of World War I are found in the poetry of

Owen, Eliot, and Yeats, who viewed war as an indication of the decay of Western civilization.

• The novelist Erich Remarque portrayed a firsthand account of trench warfare and the devastating nature of World War I.

World War I Art • Visual artists also protested against the calamities of war. Max

Ernst used collage-paintings to create bizarre dehumanized images, while George Grosz produced mocking depictions of the German military machine.

• Léger’s Cubist paintings reflect his appreciation of modern weaponry and machinery. He produced one of the first abstract films, Ballet mécanique, which pictured modern life as mechanized and impersonal.

The Russian Revolution • World War I, a corrupt tsarist government, and a weak economy

led to discontent in Russia. The Russian Revolution of 1917 marked the beginnings of Soviet communism and ushered in decades of totalitarian rule inspired by the Marxist ideology of Vladimir Lenin.

• Following Lenin, Stalin took control of Russia. Under his totalitarian regime dissidents were imprisoned, executed, or exiled, and all expressions of “Modernism” were condemned.

Figure 34.14 LI HUA, Roar! 1936. Woodcut, 8 � 6 in. Li Hua’s woodcut is representative of the modern woodcut movement that flourished in China during the 1930s. The movement was a significant expression of China’s avant-garde.

1910–1920 Mexican Revolution 1911 Nationalist Revolution in China

1914–1918 World War I 1917 Russian Revolution 1926 Stalin becomes Soviet dictator 1929 Stock market crashes

1936–1939 Spanish Civil War 1939–1945 World War II

1949 People’s Republic of China formed under Mao

Chinese artists, including Li Hua (1907–1994). Li’s stark and searing woodcut of a bound man (Figure 34.14)—a metaphor for modern China—reiterates the silent scream of Munch (see Figure 33.2) and Eisenstein (see Figure 34.12). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) China’s communist regime reinstated the official policy of socialist realism as it had been defined by the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. The consequences of this policy would work to foment the liberation movements of the last decades of the century.

BK6_001-173.indd 74BK6_001-173.indd 74 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

75

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )Glossary

Music Listening Selections

CHAPTER 34 Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Arts 427

427Volume2

gallows humor (or “black humor”) the use of morbid and absurd situations for comic and satirical purposes in modern fiction and drama

montage in art, music, or literature, a composite made by freely juxtaposing usually heterogeneous images; in cinema, the production of a rapid succession of images to present a stream of interconnected ideas

(see also Glossary, chapter 33 “photomontage”)

mural a painting applied to a large wall or ceiling

tone cluster a group of adjacent dissonant notes, such as the notes of a scale, sounded together

totalitarian a political regime that imposes the will of the state upon the life and conduct of the individual

In the arts, socialist realism promoted the ideological benefits of communism.

The Great Depression and the American Scene • America’s economy, like that of the rest of the world, suffered

after World War I, and the country was swept into the Great Depression.

• Social Realism, often a vehicle of social criticism and protest, dominated the novels of John Steinbeck and the murals of Thomas Hart Benton. As with the mural paintings of revolutionary Mexico, Benton’s murals depicting American occupations and pastimes became a major form of public art.

• Dorothea Lange and other photographers of the Great Depression left a documentary record of rural poverty and oppression.

Totalitarianism and World War II • Under Adolf Hitler, the Nazi policy of militant racism brought

about the brutal deaths of millions throughout Europe. • In the poems of Randall Jarrell, the fiction works of Norman

Mailer, and the gallows humor novels of Joseph Heller, World War II literature emphasized the dehumanizing effects of war.

• The firsthand experiences of Solzhenitsyn in the Russian gulags and Wiesel in Nazi concentration camps are shocking records of totalitarian inhumanity.

The Visual Arts in the War Era • Photography documented the horrifying realities of World War II.

The first female war photojournalist Lee Miller made moving images of Nazi concentration camps.

• Working in Paris, Picasso responded to news reports of the German aerial bombing of a Spanish market town; Guernica has become the quintessential antiwar painting of the twentieth century.

Film in the War Era • The Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein pioneered the

technique of cinematic montage to brilliant effect in the classic film The Battleship Potemkin.

• American films generally served as morale boosters and vehicles of Allied propaganda; the British actor Charlie Chaplin satirized Fascist dictatorship.

Music in the War Era • Living under the critical eye of the communist regime, Dmitri

Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev composed in distinctly different but memorable musical styles.

• In England, Benjamin Britten commemorated World War II in his War Requiem, while in Poland Krzysztof Penderecki immortalized the harsh realities of twentieth-century genocide in atonal compositions.

• Native idioms, such as folk songs and Mexican dance, were integrated into the readily accessible music of one of America’s most notable composers, Aaron Copland.

The Communist Revolution in China • After Nationalist forces in China failed to provide much-needed

land reforms, the Communist Party, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, gained control, forming the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

• Economic reform went hand in hand with the eradication of age- old traditions and the execution of dissidents and landowners. Mao’s “little red book,” which encouraged the empowerment of the masses, became the “bible” of the Chinese Revolution.

CD Two Selection 19 Copland, Appalachian Spring, excerpt, 1944.

BK6_001-173.indd 75BK6_001-173.indd 75 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

The Quest for Meaning ca. 1940–1960

Chapter

35 Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

76

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Figure 35.1 HELEN FRANKENTHALER, Before the Caves, 1958. Oil on canvas, 8 ft. 61⁄8 in. � 8 ft. 83⁄8 in.

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” Jean-Paul Sartre

Volume2428 BK6_001-173.indd 76BK6_001-173.indd 76 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

77

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

L O O K I N G A H E A D

The Cold War

Existentialism

CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning 429

429Volume2

The nightmare of World War II left the world’s population in a

state of shock and disillusion. The Western democracies had held

back the forces of totalitarian aggression, but the future seemed

as threatening as ever. The treaty settlements that ended World

War II left two large blocs of powerful nations ranged against

each other in an effort to further their individual political, social,

and ideological ends. The largest of these ideological power

blocs, the nations led by the United States and its

democratic/capitalistic ideology, stood opposed to the

Soviet/communist bloc, which came to include most of the East

European countries adjacent to Russia. Communism and capitalist

democracy now confronted one another in hostile distrust. And

both possessed nuclear capability with the potential to extinguish

the human race.

The pessimism that accompanied the two world wars was

compounded by a loss of faith in the bedrock beliefs of former

centuries. The realities of trench warfare, the Holocaust, and

Hiroshima made it difficult to maintain that human beings were

rational by nature, that technology would work to advance human

happiness, and that the universe was governed by a benevolent

God. There is little wonder that the events of the first half of the

twentieth century caused a loss of confidence in moral absolutes.

The sense of estrangement from God and reason produced a con-

dition of anxious withdrawal that has been called “alienation.” By

mid-century, the quest for meaning had produced the philosophy

of Existentialism, while the mood of alienation and anxiety per-

vaded the literature of dystopia, the personality of the fictional

antihero, and a host of new directions in the arts. Avant-garde

movements in painting, music, and dance launched America to a

position of cultural leadership in the West.

The contest for world domination—the so-called “cold war” that followed World War II—determined the course of international relations during the second half of the twentieth century. In Europe, postwar Germany was polit- ically divided, most visibly by the Berlin Wall that separat- ed Soviet-dominated East Germany from the West German Democratic Republic. As “power vacuums” occurred in the post-colonial regions of East Asia, the cold war grew hot. In the Korean peninsula, the two superpow- ers, the Soviet Union and the United States, wrestled diplomatically but unsuccessfully for dominion in what would ultimately become all-out war. The Korean War (1950–1953), fought virtually to a standoff with both sides suffering terrible losses (three million Koreans, mostly

civilians, died), ended with the division of the country into a northern communist state (the Korean People’s Democratic Republic) and a southern democratic state (the Republic of Korea). The destabilized circumstances of the lingering cold war contributed to the anxieties of the postwar era.

Existentialism, the most impor- tant philosophic movement of the twentieth century, examined the unique nature of individual expe- rience within an indifferent uni-

verse. Focusing on matters of human freedom, choice, and responsibility, it had its roots in the late nineteenth centu- ry, most notably in the writings of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). But it rose to prominence through the efforts of the French left-wing intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre.

The Philosophy of Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the leading philosopher of the twentieth century, made significant contributions as a playwright, novelist, journalist, and literary critic. Sartre fought in World War II and was active in the French resist- ance to the German occupation of France. Committed to social reform, he supported the working-class ideals of Marxist communism, but never became a member of the French Communist Party.

Sartre’s philosophy, as expounded in his classic work Being and Nothingness (1943), took as its basic premise the idea that existence precedes essence, that is, that one’s material being exists prior to and independent of any intrinsic factors. Sartre’s premise challenged the fundamen- tals of traditional philosophy: Plato had identified “essence” as Forms (or Ideas) that were eternal and unchanging. For Aristotle, reason—humankind’s capacity for rational thought—was the “essence” that separated human beings from the lower animals. Philosophers from Descartes through Kant followed the ancients by defending the notion that primary internal principles of being preceded being itself—a view that was metaphysically compatible with Christian theology.

Sartre proposed, however, that human beings have no fixed nature. They are not imbued with any special divinity, nor are they (by nature) rational. They are neither impris- oned by unconscious forces (as Freud had held) nor are they determined by specific economic conditions (as Marx had maintained). Born into the world as body/matter, they proceed to make the choices by which they form their own natures. In Sartre’s analysis, each individual is the sum of his or her actions. “We are what we choose to be,” he insisted. Because we must choose at every turn between a variety of possibilities, we are “condemned to be free.” Moreover, since every choice implies a choice for all humankind, we bear the overwhelming burden of total responsibility—a condition that Sartre called “anguish.”

BK6_001-173.indd 77BK6_001-173.indd 77 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

78

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

READING 35.1

E X P L O R I N G I S S U E S Communism versus Capitalism

430 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2430

Sartre’s viewpoint struck a balance between optimism and despair. While freedom and meaning depend on human action, said Sartre, all human actions, by necessity, are played out within a moral void—that is, within a universe lacking divine guidance and absolute values. To our profound despair, we seek meaning in a meaningless world. Yet, because human life is all there is, it must be cherished. According to Sartre, the human condition is one of anxiety experienced in the face of nothingness and the inevitability of death. Such anxiety is compounded because we alone are responsible for our actions. To dis- claim responsibility for those actions by blaming external causes—“the Devil made me do it,” “The ghetto turned me into a criminal,” or “My parents were too lenient”—is to act in “bad faith.” For Sartre, no forms of human engineer- ing, technocratic or otherwise, can usurp the human potential for free action. To fly from freedom and responsi- bility is a form of self-deception and inauthenticity. “We are alone, with no excuses,” according to Sartre.

In addition to his major philosophic work, Sartre wrote a number of significant novels, short stories, and plays. The most gripping of his plays, No Exit (1945), features three characters trapped in a “hell” they have created by their efforts to justify the acts of bad faith that have shaped their lives. The principal ideas set forth in these most famous of Sartre’s writings are summarized in the lecture entitled “Existentialism,” which Sartre presented in Paris in 1945. In the following excerpt from this essay, Sartre discusses Existentialism as an ethics of action and involvement and explores the meaning of existential anguish.

From Sartre’s “Existentialism” (1945)

. . . Atheistic existentialism . . . states that if God does not 1 exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger1 says,

human reality. What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he 10 will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It is also what is called subjectivity, the name we are labeled with when charges are brought against us. But what do we mean by this, if not that man has a greater dignity than a stone or table? For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being 20 who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future. Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower; nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be. Because by the word “will” we generally mean a conscious decision, which is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves. I may want to belong to a political party, write a book, get married; but all that is only a manifestation of an 30 earlier, more spontaneous choice that is called “will.” But if existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.

1 A German philosopher (1889–1976) whose writings had a major influence on Sartre and other Existentialists.

For roughly a half century following World War II, the great powers of the world were divided into two opposing ideological camps, popularly known as “communism” and “capitalism.” Each of these power blocs fervently defended its superiority, and the necessity of its success in the world struggle for dominance. “Communism”— in reality one of several forms of Marxist–Leninist socialism— describes a social and political system committed to the principle that the central state should own and operate the nation’s means of production and distribution of goods, with the entire population sharing the resulting wealth equally (see chapters 30 and 34). “Capitalism” describes a system based in the principle that the world’s economic capital should function according to free market

forces, described by Adam Smith (see chapter 24), and that government should have little to do with regulation of the economic and financial world. Individual initiative and enterprise would then function to produce and distribute goods among the population.

These two seemingly incompatible and competing ideologies fueled the cold war of the postwar years. While the cold war has only occasionally turned hot in the past half century—most recently in the Vietnam War (see chapter 37)—the competing ideologies of communism and capitalism, and the policies guided by these ideas, worked to destabilize international relations during most of the twentieth century.

BK6_001-173.indd 78BK6_001-173.indd 78 05/12/2009 6:52 AM05/12/2009 6:52 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

79

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning 431

consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be 100 possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our 110 conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.

That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an 120 excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.

The existentialist does not think that man is going to help himself by finding in the world some omen by which to orient himself. Because he thinks that man will interpret the omen to suit himself. Therefore, he thinks that man, with no support and no aid, is condemned every moment to invent man. Ponge,2

in a very fine article, has said, “Man is the future of man.” That’s exactly it. But if it is taken to mean that this future is recorded in heaven, that God sees it, then it is false, because it would really no longer be a future. If it is taken to 130 mean that whatever a man may be, there is a future to be forged, a virgin future before him, then this remark is sound. But then we are forlorn. . . .

Now, for the existentialist there is really no love other than one which manifests itself in a person’s being in love. There is no genius other than one which is expressed in works of art; the genius of Proust is the sum of Proust’s works; the genius of Racine is his series of tragedies. Outside of that, there is nothing. Why say that Racine could have written another tragedy, when he didn’t write it? A man is involved in life, 140 leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing. To be sure, this may seem a harsh thought to someone whose life hasn’t been a success. But, on the other hand, it prompts people to understand that reality alone is what counts, that dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations. In other words, to define him negatively and not positively. However, when we say, “You are nothing else than your life,” that does not imply that the artist will be judged solely on the basis of his works of art; a thousand 150 other things will contribute toward summing him up. What we

The word subjectivism has two meanings, and our opponents play on the two. Subjectivism means, on the one 40 hand, that an individual chooses and makes himself; and, on the other, that it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity. The second of these is the essential meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of 50 what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

If, on the other hand, existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind. If I am a workingman and choose to join a Christian trade-union rather than be a communist, and if by being a member I want to 60 show that the best thing for man is resignation, that the kingdom of man is not of this world, I am not only involving my own case—I want to be resigned for everyone. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man. 70

This helps us understand what the actual content is of such rather grandiloquent words as anguish, forlornness, despair. As you will see, it’s all quite simple.

First, what is meant by anguish? The existentialists say at once that man is anguish. What that means is this: the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility. Of course, there are many people who are not anxious; but we 80 claim that they are hiding their anxiety, that they are fleeing from it. Certainly, many people believe that when they do something, they themselves are the only ones involved, and when someone says to them, “What if everyone acted that way?” they shrug their shoulders and answer, “Everyone doesn’t act that way.” But really, one should always ask himself, “What would happen if everybody looked at things that way?” There is no escaping this disturbing thought except by a kind of double-dealing. A man who lies and makes excuses for himself by saying “not everybody does that,” is 90 someone with an uneasy conscience, because the act of lying implies that a universal value is conferred upon the lie. . . .

The existentialist . . . thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect

431Volume2

2 Francis Ponge (1899–1987) was a French poet and critic.

BK6_001-173.indd 79BK6_001-173.indd 79 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

80

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Q In your own words, explain: “existence precedes essence” and “existential anguish.”

Q Evaluate Sartre’s claims: “You are nothing else than your life,” and “Man is condemned to be free.”

Literature at Mid-Century

432 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2432

mean is that a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships which make up these undertakings. . . .

If it is impossible to find in every man some universal essence which would be human nature, yet there does exist a universal human condition. It’s not by chance that today’s thinkers speak more readily of man’s condition than of his nature. By condition they mean, more or less definitely, the a 160 priori limits which outline man’s fundamental situation in the universe. Historical situations vary; a man may be born a slave in a pagan society or a feudal lord or a proletarian. What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be mortal there. . . .

But there is another meaning of humanism. Fundamentally it is this: man is constantly outside of himself; in projecting himself, in losing himself outside of himself, he makes for man’s existing; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing 170 transcendent goals that he is able to exist; man, being this state of passing-beyond, and seizing upon things only as they bear upon this passing-beyond, is at the heart, at the center of this passing-beyond. There is no universe other than a human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This connection between transcendency, as a constituent element of man—not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of passing beyond—and subjectivity, in the sense that man is not closed in on himself but is always present in a human universe, is what we call existentialist humanism. Humanism, 180 because we remind man that there is no lawmaker other than himself, and that in his forlornness he will decide by himself; because we point out that man will fulfill himself as man, not in turning toward himself, but in seeking outside of himself a goal which is just this liberation, just this particular fulfillment.

From these few reflections it is evident that nothing is more unjust than the objections that have been raised against us. Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn’t trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude 190 of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn’t so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn’t exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you’ve got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing. 200

Christian Existentialism While Sartre excluded the question of God’s existence from his speculations, Christian Existentialists saw little contradiction between the belief in a Supreme Being and the ethics of human freedom and responsibility. They held that religious philosophy need not concern itself with the proof or disproof of God’s existence; rather, it should focus on the moral life of the individual. Beyond what Kierkegaard had called the “leap of faith” from which all religious belief proceeded, there lay a continuing moral responsibility for one’s own life. According to the philoso- phers Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) and Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), God had challenged human beings to act as free and responsible creatures.

Among Christian theologians, a similar concern for the moral life of the individual moved religion out of the seminaries and into the streets. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) criticized doctrinaire theology and called for the revival of moral conduct in an immoral society. Convinced that human participation was essential to social redemption, Niebuhr urged Christians to cultivate humility and advance justice in modern society. Niebuhr’s contemporary and fellow Lutheran Paul Tillich (1886–1965) boldly rejected the concept of a personal god. For Tillich, anxiety and alienation were conditions prelim- inary to the mystical apprehension of a “God above the God of theism.”

Utopias and Dystopias In the postwar era, the breach between humanism and sci- ence seemed wider than ever. Increasingly, intellectuals questioned the social value of scientific knowledge as it applied to human progress. Optimists still envisioned mod- ern technology as a liberating force for humankind. The American behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner (1904– 1990), for instance, anticipated a society in which the behavior of human beings might be scientifically engineered for the benefit of both the individual and the community. In the futuristic novel Walden Two (1948), Skinner created a fictional society in which the “technol- ogy of behavior” replaced traditional “prescientific” views of freedom and dignity. Walden Two is typical of a large body of utopian literature that exalted science as a positive force in shaping the future.

Pessimists, on the other hand, feared—and still fear— that modern technology might produce catastrophes ranging from a nuclear holocaust to the absolute loss of personal freedom. Dystopian literature, that is, works that picture societies in which conditions are dreadful and bleak, reflect this negative outlook. The most notable of these are Brave New World (1932) by the British writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), 1984 (1949) by England’s George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, 1903–1950), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by the American Ray Bradbury (b. 1920). All three of the novels present

BK6_001-173.indd 80BK6_001-173.indd 80 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

81

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

Science and Technology

CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning 433

postwar America, the existential perspective cut across regional lines, from the deep South of William Faulkner (1897–1962) and Walker Percy (1916–1990) to John Cheever’s (1912–1982) New England and Bernard Malamud’s (1914–1986) New York: and from the urban Midwest of Saul Bellow (1915–2005) to California’s Beat Generation. The Beat Generation were a group of writers who prized bohemian creativity, anticonformity, and a spontaneous lifestyle. They are best represented by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1951), a saga of youthful restless- ness that Kerouac called his “true-story novel”; and by Allen Ginsberg’s long, in-your-face poem Howl (1955). The latter, a ranting lament on America’s loss of values, makes notorious reference to illicit drugs, to sexuality and homosexuality, and to the evils of American commercial- ism. It opens with these angry lines:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix;

angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection

to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, . . . .

Postwar dramatists also treated the existential experi- ence: in the Pulitzer prize-winning play Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller (1915–2005), the antihero is a quintessentially American figure. Miller’s protagonist, Willy Loman, is a salesman, a “little man” who has met failure at every turn, but he cannot recognize the inauthen- ticity of his false claims to material success nor escape the futility of his self-deception. An American classic, Salesman depends on traditional dramatic structure in bringing to life a complex but ultimately sympathetic existential figure. An entirely different type of theater, however, would come to dominate the postwar era.

Theater of the Absurd The international movement known as theater of the absurd so vividly captured the anguish of modern society that late twentieth-century critics called it “the true theater of our time.” Abandoning Classical theater from Sophocles and Shakespeare through Ibsen and Miller, Absurdist play- wrights rejected traditional dramatic structure (in which

fictional totalitarian societies in which modern technology and the techniques of human engineering operate to destroy human freedom.

Brave New World describes an imaginary society of the seventh century “A.F.” (“after Henry Ford,” the early twentieth-century American automobile manufacturer). In Huxley’s futuristic society, babies are conceived in test tubes and, following the assembly line methods invented by Henry Ford for the manufacture of cars, individuals are behaviorally conditioned to perform socially beneficial tasks. From this “brave new world,” the concept and prac- tice of family life have been eradicated; human anxieties are quelled by means of soma (a mood-altering drug); and art, literature, and religion—all of which, according to the custodians of technology, threaten communal order and stability—have been ruthlessly purged.

The Literary Antihero The postwar era witnessed the birth of a new kind of liter- ary hero: a hero who, deprived of traditional values and religious beliefs, bears the burden of freedom and the total responsibility for his actions. The existential hero—or, more exactly, antihero—takes up the quest for meaning: alienated by nature and circumstance, he makes choices in a world lacking moral absolutes, a world in which no act might be called “good” unless it is chosen in conscious preference to its alternatives. Unlike the heroes of old, the modern antihero is neither noble nor sure of purpose. He might act decisively, but with full recognition of the absence of shared cultural values or personal reward. Trapped rather than liberated by freedom, he might have trouble getting along with others or simply making it through the day—“Hell,” says one of Sartre’s characters in No Exit, “is other people.” Confronting meaninglessness and irrationality, the antihero might achieve nothing other than the awful recognition of life’s absurdity.

Twentieth-century literature is filled with antiheroes— characters whose lives illustrate the absurdity of the human condition. Sartre’s compatriot Albert Camus (1913–1960) defined the absurd as the “divorce between man and life, actor and setting.” In Camus’ short stories and novels, the antihero inevitably confronts the basic existential impera- tives: “Recognize your dignity as a human being”; “Choose and commit yourself to action.” The central character of Camus’ classic work The Stranger (1942) is the quintessen- tial alienated man: he is estranged from traditional social values and unable to establish his sense of being except through continual rebellion. Camus’ view of human nature was less cynical than Sartre’s and more concerned with the value of benevolent reconciliation between individuals. At the same time, the situations described in his novels—and his own death in an automobile crash—seem inescapably arbitrary and absurd.

Although Existentialism was an essentially European phenomenon, the existential hero appears in the literature of twentieth-century writers throughout the world, most notably in the novels of Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges (see chapter 37) and Japan’s Oē Kenzaburo (b. 1935). In

433Volume2

1944 a Canadian bacteriologist proves DNA is fundamental in determining heredity

1946 the first functional electronic digital computer is tested in America

1947 quantum electrodynamics (QED) studies “irregular” behavior of subatomic particles

1948 Bell Laboratories develop the transistor 1951 nuclear reactors are utilized successfully to produce

electricity

BK6_001-173.indd 81BK6_001-173.indd 81 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

82

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

READING 35.2

434 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2434

action moves from conflict to resolution), along with tradi- tional modes of character development. The Absurdist play, which drew stylistic inspiration from Dada performance art and Surrealist film, lacks dramatic progression, direction, and resolution. Its characters undergo little or no change, dialogue contradicts actions, and events follow no logical order. Dramatic action, leavened with gallows humor, may consist of irrational and grotesque situations that remain unresolved at the end of the performance—as is often the case in real life.

The principal figures of Absurdist theater reflect the international character of the movement: they include Samuel Beckett (Irish), Eugène Ionesco (Romanian), Harold Pinter (British), Fernando Arrabal (Spanish), Jean Genet (French), and Edward Albee (American). Of these, Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), recipient of the Nobel Prize in 1969, earned the greatest distinction. Early in his career, Beckett came under the influence of James Joyce, parts of whose novel Finnegans Wake he recorded from dictation, as the aging Joyce was losing his eyesight. Beckett admired Joyce’s experimental use of language. He also shared the views of the Austrian linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (see chapter 37), who held that human beings were imprisoned by language and consequently cut off from the possibility of true understanding.

The concept of language as the prisonhouse of the mind—a point of view that had far-reaching consequences in Postmodern philosophy—was fundamental to Beckett’s dramatic style. It is particularly apparent in his most notable work, Waiting for Godot, written in 1948 and first staged in 1952. The main “action” of the play consists of a running dialogue—terse, repetitious, and often comical— between two tramps as they await the mysterious “Godot” (who, despite their anxious expectations, never arrives). Some find in Godot a symbol of salvation, revelation, or, most commonly, God—an interpretation that Beckett him- self rejected. Nevertheless, the absent “deliverer” (perhaps by his very absence) gives a modicum of meaning to the lives of the central characters. Their longings and delusions, their paralysis and ignorance, are anticipated in the play’s opening line, “Nothing to be done.” The progress of the play, animated by an extraordinary blend of biblical references, broad slapstick, comic wordplay, Zenlike propositions, and crude jokes, gives life to Sartre’s observation that “man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future” (see Reading 35.1). A parable of the existential condition, Waiting for Godot dwells on the divorce between expectation and event. At the same time (and as the brief excerpt from the end of Act Two illus- trates), the play underscores the futility of communication between frail creatures who cling (and wait) together.

From Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948)

Estragon: Where shall we go? 1 Vladimir: Not far. Estragon: Oh yes, let’s go far away from here. Vladimir: We can’t.

Estragon: Why not? Vladimir: We have to come back to-morrow. Estragon: What for? Vladimir: To wait for Godot. Estragon: Ah! (Silence.) He didn’t come? Vladimir: No. 10 Estragon: And now it’s too late. Vladimir: Yes, now it’s night. Estragon: And if we dropped him. (Pause.) If we

dropped him? Vladimir: He’d punish us. (Silence. He looks at the tree.)

Everything’s dead but the tree. Estragon (Looking at the tree): What is it? Vladimir: It’s the tree. Estragon: Yes, but what kind? Vladimir: I don’t know. A willow. 20

(Estragon draws Vladimir towards the tree. They stand motionless before it. Silence.)

Estragon: Why don’t we hang ourselves? Vladimir: With what? Estragon: You haven’t got a bit of rope? Vladimir: No. Estragon: Then we can’t.

(Silence.) Vladimir: Let’s go. Estragon: Wait, there’s my belt. Vladimir: It’s too short. Estragon: You could hang on to my legs. Vladimir: And who’d hang on to mine? 30 Estragon: True. Vladimir: Show all the same. (Estragon loosens the cord

that holds up his trousers which, much too big for him, fall about his ankles. They look at the cord.) It might do at a pinch. But is it strong enough?

Estragon: We’ll soon see. Here. (They each take an end of the cord and pull. It breaks. They almost fall.)

Vladimir: Not worth a curse. (Silence.)

Estragon: You say we have to come back to-morrow? Vladimir: Yes. Estragon: Then we can bring a good bit of rope. 40 Vladimir: Yes.

(Silence.) Estragon: Didi. Vladimir: Yes. Estragon: I can’t go on like this. Vladimir: That’s what you think. Estragon: If we parted? That might be better for us. Vladimir: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless

Godot comes. Estragon: And if he comes? Vladimir: We’ll be saved. 50

(Vladimir takes off his hat (Lucky’s), peers inside it, feels about inside it, shakes it, knocks on the crown, puts it on again.)

Estragon: Well? Shall we go? Vladimir: Pull on your trousers. Estragon: What?

BK6_001-173.indd 82BK6_001-173.indd 82 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Q What aspects of “the absurd” are communicated in this reading?

Q Do the two protagonists differ in personality?

READING 35.3

Q How does Thomas use the imagery of light and dark in this poem?

Q Does religious faith play any part here?

READING 35.4

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

83

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning 435

Vladimir: Pull on your trousers. Estragon: You want me to pull off my trousers? Vladimir: Pull ON your trousers. Estragon (Realizing his trousers are down): True. (He pulls

up his trousers.) Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go. 60

(They do not move.) (Curtain.)

Poetry at Mid-Century: Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) took a thoughtful attitude toward the modern condition, which he viewed as a mere stopping point between birth and death. Calling himself a Welshman first and a drunkard second, he became famous in America for his rhapsodic public readings and for the sheer musicality of his poetry. His poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” published just after the death of his father in 1951, makes a plea for life-affirming action even in the face of death. Thomas creates a rhyth- mic litany with the phrases “wise men,” “good men,” “wild men,” “grave men”—resolving four of the six stanzas with the imperative: “rage against the dying of the light.” The reference to those “who see with blinding sight” was prob- ably inspired by the loss of vision that the poet’s school- teacher father suffered during his last years of life, but it also may be taken as an allusion to his father’s agnosticism, that is, to his spiritual blindness—and, more generally, to the mood of alienation afflicting a generation of modern disbelievers. In 1954, Igor Stravinsky used this poem as the basis for In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, a piece written for tenor, string orchestra, and two trombones.

Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (1951)

Do not go gentle into that good night, 1 Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they 5 Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 10 And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 15

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Rabindranath Tagore In contrast with Thomas, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) saw a world in spiritual deterioration. For Tagore, the crisis of modern society lay in a set of mis- placed values that prized the rush of business and the acquisition of material comforts at the expense of beauty, creativity, and spiritual harmony. Born in Bengal, India (while the province was still under British control), Tagore was raised in a family of artists, musicians, and social reformers. After a brief stay in England, he returned to India, where he became a prolific writer, publishing some sixty volumes of poetry, plays, stories, and novels.

In India, Tagore pursued his ambition to foster a “spiri- tual unity of all races” by founding an international educa- tional institute for the exchange of ideas between Western scholars and Indian students. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, Tagore left a body of writings that offers an Eastern, and specifically Hindu, approach to the mod- ern quest for meaning. In his narrative poem, “The Man Had No Useful Work,” he deals with the existential responsibility for individual choice. This provocative alle- gory questions the value of the practical, goal-oriented pur- suits that drive most modern societies. It also plays on the ironic possibility that works of art may be both meaningless and essential.

Tagore’s “The Man Had No Useful Work” (1921)

The man had no useful work, only vagaries of various kinds. 1 Therefore it surprised him to find himself in Paradise after a

life spent perfecting trifles. Now the guide had taken him by mistake to the wrong

Paradise—one meant only for good, busy souls.

In this Paradise, our man saunters along the road only to

obstruct the rush of business. He stands aside from the path and is warned that he tramples

on sown seed. Pushed, he starts up: hustled, he moves on. 5 A very busy girl comes to fetch water from the well. Her feet

run on the pavement like rapid fingers over harp-strings. Hastily she ties a negligent knot with her hair, and loose locks on her forehead pry into the dark of her eyes.

The man says to her, “Would you lend me your pitcher?” “My pitcher?” she asks, “to draw water?” “No, to paint patterns on.” “I have no time to waste,” the girl retorts in contempt. 10

435Volume2BK6_001-173.indd 83BK6_001-173.indd 83 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

84

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Q What does each figure in Tagore’s allegory represent?

Q Is there a “moral” to this story?

The Visual Arts at Mid-Century

436 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2436

Now a busy soul has no chance against one who is supremely idle.

Every day she meets him at the well, and every day he repeats the same request, till at last she yields.

Our man paints the pitcher with curious colors in a mysterious maze of lines.

The girl takes it up, turns it round and asks, “What does it mean?”

“It has no meaning,” he answers. 15

The girl carries the pitcher home. She holds it up in different lights and tries to con its mystery.

At night she leaves her bed, lights a lamp, and gazes at it from all points of view.

This is the first time she has met with something without meaning.

On the next day the man is again near the well. The girl asks, “What do you want?” 20 “To do more work for you!” “What work?” she enquires. “Allow me to weave colored strands into a ribbon to bind your

hair.” “Is there any need?” she asks. “None whatever,” he allows. 25 The ribbon is made, and thenceforward she spends a great

deal of time over her hair.

The even stretch of well-employed time in that Paradise begins to show irregular rents.

The elders are troubled; they meet in council. The guide confesses his blunder, saying that he has brought

the wrong man to the wrong place. The wrong man is called. His turban, flaming with color,

shows plainly how great that blunder has been. 30 The chief of the elders says, “You must go back to the earth.” The man heaves a sigh of relief: “I am ready.” The girl with the ribbon round her hair chimes in: “I also!” For the first time the chief of the elders is faced with a

situation which has no sense in it.

The major figure in postwar European art was the Dublin-born painter Francis Bacon (1909– 1992). Self-trained, Bacon infused European Expressionism with an

eccentric approach to form that turned human and animal figures into flayed carcasses and mangled skeletons. Like a sorcerer, he transformed his favorite images from film, mag- azine illustrations, and the history of art into grotesque and deformed (but sensuously painted) icons.

Bacon had never seen the original portrait of Pope Innocent X, executed in 1650 by Diego Velázquez (see

chapter 21); however, he owned many reproductions of the painting and was haunted by the lonely presence of its sub- ject. Painting more than twenty-five versions of the work, Bacon imprisoned the figure in a transparent cage, immo- bilized by ambiguous lines of force (Figure 35.2). The ven- erable pope became a visceral expression of anguish and alienation. His silent scream, a logo for despiritualized Modernism, looks back to Munch (Figure 33.2), Eisenstein (Figure 34.1), and Picasso (Figure 34.10), all of whom Bacon admired.

Abstract Expressionism For hundreds of years, almost all important new styles in painting had originated in Paris or other European cities. After 1945, however, the United States, and New York City in particular, took the lead with a radical new style called Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism had its roots in the Modernist assault on traditional, represen- tational art. It took inspiration from the reductionist abstractions of Picasso and Matisse, the colorist experi- ments of Wassily Kandinsky, the nonsensical performances of Dada, and the “automatic” art of the Surrealists. The new style embraced the role of chance with existential fervor; it also seemed resonant of the quantum physicist’s description of the universe as a series of continuously shift- ing random patterns. Whether or not such theories direct- ly influenced the visual arts, they paralleled the experiments in random art that occurred at this time.

Figure 35.2 FRANCIS BACON, Head VI, 1949. Oil on canvas, 363⁄4 � 301⁄4 in. The painting has become an icon of existential despair. The pope’s gaping mouth was inspired by the screaming woman from the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (see Figure 34.12), and by graphic illustrations of diseases of the mouth in a book the artist had purchased in Paris.

BK6_001-173.indd 84BK6_001-173.indd 84 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

85

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

35.4). Kline, who used housepainters’ brushes on canvases that often measured over 10 feet square, achieved a sense of rugged immediacy (which he called “snap”).

Pollock The best known of the Abstract Expressionists is Wyoming- born Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). His early paintings reveal a coarse figural style and brutal brushwork similar to de Kooning’s, but by 1945 Pollock had devised a technique that made action itself the subject of the painting. Instead of mounting the canvas on an easel, he strapped it to the floor of his studio and proceeded to drip, splash, pour, and spread oil, enamel, and commercial aluminum paints across its surface (Figure 35.6). Layered filaments of paint—the artist’s seductive “handwriting”—mingled with sand, nails, matches, bottle shards, and occasional cigarette butts.

CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning 437

437Volume2

Figure 35.3 WILLEM DE KOONING, Woman and Bicycle, 1952–1953. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 41⁄2 in. � 4 ft. 1 in. Despite what seem to be urgent and spontaneous brushstrokes, the painting required more than eighteen months of effort, during which the artist repeatedly laid on, scraped away, and restored color to the canvas.

In America, Abstract Expressionism ushered in the so-called “heroic age” of American painting. The pioneers of the movement were a group of talented immigrants who had escaped Nazi oppression and the perils of war-torn Europe. These artists included Arshile Gorky (1905–1948), Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), all of whom moved to New York between 1920 and 1930. Working on large canvases and using oversized brushes, paint was applied in a loose, free, and instinctive manner that emphasized the physical gesture—the very act of painting.

Abstract Expressionist paintings are usually nonrepresentational, but where recognizable subject matter appears, as in de Kooning’s series of fierce, totemic women—one of his favorite sub- jects—it is rendered with frenzied, subjective urgency (Figure 35.3). De Kooning’s wide-eyed females, with their huge breasts and toothy grins, were thought by some to reflect a negative view of women. Actually, however, they took their inspiration from Sumerian votive sculptures and Earth Mother images (see Figures 0.5 and 1.2). De Kooning joked that his women were the sisters of popular pin-ups and billboard goddesses, celebrated for their vacant “American smile.”

By contrast, the huge black-and-white canvases of Franz Kline (1910–1962) consist entirely of imposing, abstract shapes. Though wholly nonrepresentational, they call to mind the powerful angularity of bridges, steel mills, and other monuments of postwar urban expansion (see Figure

BK6_001-173.indd 85BK6_001-173.indd 85 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

86

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

M A K I N G C O N N E C T I O N S

438 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2438

Pollock’s daring new method, which came to be called action painting, allowed him (as he explained) “to walk around [the canvas], work from the four sides and literally be in the painting,” a method inspired by the healing ritu- als of Navajo sand painting whose union of intuition, improvisation, and rigorous control he admired. “It seems to me,” he observed, “that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past cul- ture. Each age finds its own technique.” Pollock’s canvases

are baffling studies in sensation, density, and rhythm, but they are apt metaphors for an age that defined physical reality in terms of process, uncertainty, and chance. Like the currents in some cosmic whirlpool, the galactic paint threads of Lavender Mist (Figure 35.7) seem to expand beyond the limits of the canvas, as if to mirror postwar the- ories of quantum forces in an expanding universe. Pollock viewed each of his works of art as having a life of its own, but he insisted that he controlled its direction: “There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.”

For centuries, Japan’s Zen masters practiced the art of calligraphy, an art whose practice was revived in the eighteenth century (see chapter 21). Executed with large brushes dipped in black ink, Zen paintings were acts of meditation that required concentration and focus, and an intuitive balance of improvisation and control (Figure 35.5). Usually confined to silk or paper scrolls no more than 4 or 5 feet in length, these calligraphic works convey the vigor of larger paintings like those of the Abstract Expressionists (Figure 35.4). While the latter may not have been directly influenced by the Zen

Figure 35.5 TOREI ENJI, Calligraphic Talisman, late eighteenth century. Sumi on paper, 4 ft. 23⁄4 in. � 107⁄8 in.

masters, they were probably aware of the radical Japanese postwar group known as the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Concrete Art Association). The indirect heirs of the Zen masters, the Gutai sponsored “action events” that harnessed physical action to chance. Their performances featured the spontaneous and occasionally outrageous manipulation of paint, which might be flung or hurled at the canvas. Like the abstract expressionists, the Gutai united improvisation and control in the tradition of Japan’s Zen masters.

Figure 35.4 FRANZ KLINE, Mahoning, 1956. Oil and paper collage on canvas, 6 ft. 8 in. � 8 ft. 4 in.

BK6_001-173.indd 86BK6_001-173.indd 86 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

87

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

Color-Field Painting One variety of Abstract Expressionism, known as color-field painting, involved the application of large, often transpar- ent, layers of paint to the surface of the canvas. The paint- ings of Mark Rothko (1903–1970) consist of translucent, soft-edged blocks of color that float mysteriously on the surfaces of yet other fields of color (Figure 35.8). These huge, sensuous compositions derive their power from the subtle interaction of rich layers of paint, which seem to glow from within. Rothko himself insisted that his subject matter was “tragedy, ecstasy, and doom,” states of mind that are best appreciated by close—18 inches, advised the artist—contemplation of the luminous originals, whose subtlety is lost in photographic reproduction. “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them,” he contended; “and if you . . . are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.” Rothko took his own life in 1970.

While Rothko’s abstract shapes are usually self-con- tained, those of Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) tend to swell and expand like exotic blooms (see Figure 35.1). Frankenthaler cultivated the practice of pouring thin washes of paint directly from coffee tins onto raw or unprimed (without gesso undercoat) canvas. Her lyrical compositions, often heroic in scale, capture the transpar- ent freshness of watercolors.

In a culture increasingly dominated by mass mechaniza- tion, American Abstractionists asserted their preference for an art that was gestural, personal, and spontaneous. The process of making art was becoming as important as the

439Volume2

Figure 35.6 Jackson Pollock at work in his Long Island studio, 1950.

Figure 35.7 JACKSON POLLOCK, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950. Oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas, 7ft. 3in. � 9ft. 10in. Compositions like this one anticipated some of the photographs of outer space taken in the mid 1990s by the Hubble space telescope.

BK6_001-173.indd 87BK6_001-173.indd 87 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

88

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

440 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2440

product. At the same time, these artists seemed to turn their backs on bourgeois taste by creating artworks that were simply too large to hang in the average living room. As the movement developed, in fact, the size of the canvas grew as if to accommodate the heroic ambitions of the artists themselves. Ironically, however, these artworks, which scorned the depersonalizing effects of capitalist technology, came to be prized by the guardians of that very technology. Abstract Expressionist paintings, which now hang in cor- porate offices, hotels, banks, and sanctuaries (such as Houston’s nondenominational Rothko Chapel), have become hallmarks of modern sophistication.

Hopper’s America The Abstract Expressionists represented a decisive break with the Realist tradition in American painting and with Social Realism in particular. Nevertheless, throughout the century, representational art continued to flourish. The paintings of the New York artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967), for instance, present a figurative view of an urban America that is bleak and empty of meaningful rela- tionships. Hopper’s fondness for American cinema and the- ater is reflected in oddly cropped, artificially lit compositions that often resemble film stills. Like the film still, Hopper’s frozen moments seem to belong to a larger, existential narrative. In Nighthawks (Figure 35.9), Hopper depicts a harshly lit all-night diner, whose occupants share the same small space but little intimacy. His characters, estranged and isolated in the mundane interiors of “one- night cheap hotels” and “sawdust restaurants,” call to mind Eliot’s Prufrock.

Figure 35.9 EDWARD HOPPER, Nighthawks, 1942. Oil on canvas, 33 1⁄8 in. � 5 ft. 1⁄8 in. Hopper was notorious for painting the joyless, mundane activities of everyday urban life. A native New Yorker, he reported that his inspiration for this melancholy scene was a corner restaurant on Greenwich Avenue.

Figure 35.8 MARK ROTHKO, Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 9 in. � 4 ft. 21⁄8 in.

BK6_001-173.indd 88BK6_001-173.indd 88 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Sculpture at Mid-Century

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

89

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

Giacometti The mood of existential anxiety also dominated interna- tional sculpture. What the art critic Herbert Read called a “geometry of fear” is evident in the figurative and the nonfigurative sculpture of the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966). In 1930 Giacometti came under the influence of Surrealism, but in the postwar era he devised a new language with which to describe the human figure and the human condition. In both small and large clay works, thereafter cast in bronze, he transformed figu- rative subjects into haunting, spindly creatures that seem to symbolize existential solitude (Figure 35.10). Giacometti’s disengaged and ravaged figures were greatly admired by Sartre, who wrote the introduction to the cat- alogue for the artist’s one-man exhibition in New York City in 1948. Giacometti’s ties to Existentialist writers secured his commission to design the set for the original produc- tion of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Segal In America, the haunting works of George Segal (1924–2000) captured the modern mood of alienation. Segal devised a unique method of constructing life-sized figures from plaster casts of live models—often friends and members of his own family. He installed these ghostly replicas in mundane settings staged with ordinary, uncast props: barstools, streetlights, beds, bus seats (Figure 35.11). These “assembled environments,” as he called them, allowed Segal to comment on

matters of alienation, social injustice, and the failure of communication in modern life. Stylistically, Segal’s tableaux link the tradition of Realist sculpture to the pop and performance art movements of the later twentieth century (see chapter 37).

Smith The nonfigurative sculpture of the postwar era shared the improvisatory vitality of Abstract Expressionist painting. American sculptors, exploiting such industrial materials as welded iron and steel, constructed iconic abstractions that were monumental in size and dynamic in spirit. Among the pioneers of constructed sculpture was the Midwestern artist David Smith (1906–1965). Smith learned to weld while in college during a summer job at an automobile plant. He mastered a variety of other industrial processes while work- ing in a wartime locomotive factory. His early pieces were large, welded iron forms sprayed with multiple layers of auto- mobile enamel. During the 1950s, he began to construct

Volume2

Figure 35.10 ALBERTO GIACOMETTI, City Square (La Place), 1948. Bronze, 81⁄2 � 253⁄8 � 171⁄4 in. The isolation of each individual (on what might be an urban street) is conveyed by the fact that no figure, if extended in its forward movement, would encounter another figure in the spatial field.

Figure 35.11 GEORGE SEGAL, Bus Riders, 1962. Plaster, cottongauze, steel, wood, and vinyl, 5 ft. 10 in. � 3 ft. 63⁄8 in. � 7 ft. 63⁄4 in. Segal used actual plaster-bandage casts of the models in his early sculptures. Later, he began painting them with bright colors; and finally, they were cast in bronze with a white patina to resemble the original ghostly plaster.

441BK6_001-173.indd 89BK6_001-173.indd 89 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

90

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

442 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2442

boxlike stainless steel forms whose surfaces he burnished and scraped with motorized tools so that they reflected the col- ors of their surroundings (Figure 35.12).

Smith forged a new structural style based on industrial techniques. His heroic forms share the calligraphic energy of Franz Kline’s gestural abstractions: they capture a sense of aggressive movement that animates the space around them. While the efforts of Giacometti and Segal may reflect existential despair, Smith’s sculptures symbolize the optimistic spirit of postwar America. “The metal itself,” he insisted, “possesses little art history. What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, move- ment, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality.”

Calder The American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898–1976) was a contemporary of the Surrealists, whom he met in Paris in 1926. Influenced by the work of Duchamp and Miró, Calder created abstract wire constructions. These he motorized or hung from ceilings so that they floated freely in the air. Calder’s wind-driven mobiles, which range from a few inches in size to enormous proportions, take advan- tage of the “chance” effects of air currents to create con- stantly changing relationships between volumes and voids, that is, between brightly colored, biomorphic aluminum shapes and the surrounding space (Figure 35.13).

Figure 35.12 DAVID SMITH, Cubi XVII, 1963. Stainless steel, height 9 ft. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Smith made cardboard maquettes of each Cubi from old liquor cartons before transposing them into stainless steel forms. He likened the marks on the burnished surfaces to brushstrokes.

Figure 35.13 ALEXANDER CALDER, Big Red, 1959. Sheet metal and steel wire, 6 ft. 2 in. � 9 ft. 6 in.

BK6_001-173.indd 90BK6_001-173.indd 90 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Architecture at Mid-Century

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

91

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

Film at Mid-Century

CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning 443

By the middle of the twentieth century, public architecture assumed a distinctly international character. The princi- ples of International Style architecture, based on the use of structural steel, ferroconcrete, and glass, had gained popu- larity through the influence of Bauhaus-trained architects and Le Corbusier (see chapter 32). Standardization and machinelike efficiency became the hallmarks of high-rise urban apartment buildings, constructed in their thousands to provide low-rent housing in the decades after 1930. In the building of schools, factories, and offices, the simplici- ty and austerity of the International Style echoed the mood of depersonalization that prevailed in the arts. International Style skyscrapers became symbols of corpo- rate wealth and modern technocracy. They reflected the materialism of the twentieth century as powerfully as the Gothic cathedral summed up the spirituality of the High Middle Ages.

Van der Rohe Among the most daring of the International Style propo- nents was the Dutch architect (and the last director of the Bauhaus) Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). Mies’ credo “less is more” inspired austere structures such as the Seagram Building in New York City, designed in

partnership with Philip Johnson (1906–2005) in 1958 (Figure 35.14). This sleek, unadorned slab of metallic bronze and amber glass was “the last word” in sophisticat- ed machine engineering and a monument to the “form fol- lows function” credo of the International Style. The proportions of the building are as impeccable as those of any Classical structure: the raised level at the bottom is balanced at the top by a four-story band of darker glass. For decades, the Seagram Building influenced glass-and-steel- box architecture; unfortunately, in many of its imitators, it was the cool, impersonal quality of the building and not its poetic simplicity that prevailed.

At mid-century, some of the world’s leading architects reacted against the strict geometry and functional purism of International Style architecture. Instead, they provided subjective, personal, and even romantic alternatives to the cool rationalism of the International Style. Using the medium of cast concrete, they created organically shaped structures that were as gestural as the sculptures of Smith and as lyrical as the paintings of Frankenthaler. The Trans World Airlines Terminal at New York’s Kennedy Airport (Figure 35.15), for example, designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen (1910–1961), is a metaphor for flight: its cross-vaulted roof—a steel structure surfaced with concrete—flares upward like a gigantic bird. The interior

443Volume2

In the postwar era, filmmakers took a number of new directions. In Italy, the Neorealism of Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) probed the bitter consequences of fascism. With the film Open City (1945), Rossellini replaced the cinema of entertainment with a brutal new genre that chronicled human tragedies as if they were natural disasters. Wedded to Realism in both style and substance, Rossellini employed nonprofessional actors and filmed entirely on location. Neorealist cinema self-consciously rejected the artifice of cinematic moralizing and Hollywood “staging,” seeking instead to depict the harsh realities of commonplace existence.

A second direction in postwar film appeared in the form of film noir, a cinematic style (especially popular in Germany, France, and America) that dealt with the dark world of crime and intrigue. Unlike the gangster movies of the 1930s, film noir conveyed a mood of disillusion and resignation proceeding from moral ambiguities between good and evil. In the American film Double Indemnity (1944), the femme fatale (the dangerous, seductive woman) made one of her earliest cinematic appearances. And in the film noir classic, A Touch of Evil (1958), the multitalented director and actor Orson Welles (1915–1985) used long takes (shots of twenty or more seconds), high and low camera positions, and off-center compositions to create sinister characters and ominous settings.

A third film genre, the thriller, dominated by the impresario Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), depended for its impact on suspense rather than graphic violence. Hitchcock’s unique combination of story and style—quick shots that alternate between the character and the (often fearful) object of his gaze—were particularly successful in

such films as Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960). Postwar cinema took up the quest for meaning by way of films

that challenged traditional moral values. The pioneer Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) explored the complexities of modern life by revisiting traditional samurai legends. A highly skilled director, he used unusual camera angles, flashbacks, and a stringent economy of expression in the classics Rashōmon (1950) and The Seven Samurai (1954). These films convey Kurosawa’s utopian view that positive social action can redeem the world’s evils.

Bergman Less optimistic concerning the fate of humankind was the Swedish cinematic giant Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007). In his almost four dozen films, Bergman probed the troubled lives of modern men and women. The loss of God, the acknowledgment of spiritual and emotional alienation, and the anxieties that accompany self- understanding are his principal themes. Bergman’s most notable films are The Seventh Seal (1956), Wild Strawberries (1957), and Persona (1966). His landmark work, The Seventh Seal, is an allegorical tale of despair in the face of impending death. Set in medieval Europe (and inspired by the Revelation of Saint John in the New Testament), it is the story of a knight who returns home from the Crusades, only to confront widespread plague and human suffering. Disillusioned, he ultimately challenges Death to a game of chess, the stakes of which are life itself. Bergman compared filmmaking to composing music: a non-narrative and largely intuitive enterprise. His apocalyptic visions, translated to film, proceeded from what he called “the administration of the unspeakable.”

BK6_001-173.indd 91BK6_001-173.indd 91 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

92

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

444 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2444

of the terminal unfolds gradually and mysteriously to embrace fluid, uninterrupted space.

Wright at Mid-Century One of the most original minds of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright had produced notable examples of domestic architecture as early as 1909 (see Figures 32.22 and 32.23). At mid-century, he designed one of the most unique buildings in America: the Guggenheim Museum. An architectural landmark that contrasts vividly with Manhattan’s typically boxy vertical buildings, the museum is configured as a ribbon of white ferroconcrete that winds into a cylindrical shape, narrowing from top to bottom. Its interior, which resembles the inside of a huge snail shell, consists of a continuous spiral ramp fixed around an open, central well (Figure 35.16). A clear glass dome at the top allows natural light to bathe interior space, whose breath- taking enclosure competes seductively with most of the artwork exhibited therein. A ten-story limestone exten- sion added in 1992 has reduced the dramatic contrast between the rotunda and its urban setting, but it does not destroy the eloquence of the original design (Figure 35.17). The Guggenheim remains the definitive example of the modern architectural imagination.

Fuller The architectural visionary and pioneer environmentalist, Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), saw few of his futuristic ideas realized in tangible form. Fuller was ahead of his time in realizing that the earth’s resources are finite and the planet (which he called “spaceship Earth”) is a fragile entity. His campaigns for energy-efficient, affordable housing inspired one of the earliest prefabricated house

Figure 35.14 LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE, Seagram Building, New York, 1954–1958. Metallic bronze and amber glass.

Figure 35.15 EERO SAARINEN, Trans World Airlines Terminal, Kennedy Airport, New York, 1962.

BK6_001-173.indd 92BK6_001-173.indd 92 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

93

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

445Volume2

Figure 35.16 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum interior, 1957–1959. Objecting to the problems associated with hanging paintings on walls that are not strictly vertical, Willem de Kooning and twenty other artists wrote a letter refusing to show their works in the museum. Traditionally configured rooms have been added to Wright’s original design.

Figure 35.17 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1957–1959.

BK6_001-173.indd 93BK6_001-173.indd 93 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

94

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Music and Dance at Mid-Century

446 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2446

designs: the Dymaxion (1927) was a metal structure hung from a central mast with outer walls of continuous glass.

Fuller is best known for his geodesic domes, which depend on the tensile properties of lightweight triangular elements. This type of construction, which uses a mini- mum of structure to create maximum strength, could be mass-produced cheaply and flown anywhere by helicopter to provide instant shelter. Like the Dymaxion, the geodes- ic dome that he designed for the 1967 International Exposition in Montreal (Figure 35.18) had little impact on architectural construction until the end of the twenti- eth century (see Figure 37.22).

Cage The most inventive figure in mid twentieth-century music was the American composer John Cage (1912–1992). Cage styled himself a student of architecture and garden- ing, and a devotee of Zen Buddhism. He studied with

Arnold Schoenberg (see chapter 32), who described him as an inventor, rather than a composer. A leading spokesman for experimentation, Cage once defined music as a combi- nation of sounds (specific pitches), noise (nonpitched sounds), and silence, with rhythm as the common denom- inator. “Everything we do is music,” he insisted.

In 1938 Cage invented the prepared piano, a tradition- al Steinway piano modified by attaching to its strings pieces of rubber, bamboo slats, bolts, and other objects. When played, the prepared piano becomes something like a per- cussion instrument, the sounds of which resemble those of a Balinese orchestra; as Cage observed, “a percussive orchestra under the control of a single player.” The Sonata V (1948), written for the prepared piano, belongs to a series of sixteen sonatas and four interludes that reflect the composer’s introduction to Indian music and philosophy. These early compositions are delicate in timbre and tex- ture and elegant in percussive rhythms.

Figure 35.18 RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER, geodesic dome, U.S. Pavilion, Montreal International Exposition, 1967. The original dome, which served as the United States Pavilion at Expo ‘67, was 250 feet in diameter and 200 feet high. In 1976, a fire destroyed the acrylic surface but left the lattice frame of the dome, which has since been restored.

See Music Listening Selections at end of chapter.��

��

BK6_001-173.indd 94BK6_001-173.indd 94 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

95

T J1

23 -8

-2 00

9 LK

V W

D 00

11 T

ra di

tio n

H um

an is

tic 6

th E

di tio

n W

:2 20

m m

x H

:2 92

m m

1 75

L 11

5 S

to ra

E ns

o M

/A M

ag en

ta (

V )

CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning 447447

Cage’s later works were radically experimental, especial- ly in their effort to accommodate silence and nonpitched sound. In 1953, Cage composed 4' 33", a piece in which a performer sits motionless before the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The “music” of 4' 33" consists of the fleeting, random sounds that occur during the designat- ed time period—the breathing of the pianist, the shuffling of the audience’s feet, or the distant hum of traffic outside of the concert hall.

Much of Cage’s music is aleatory, that is, based on chance or random procedures. To determine the placement of notes in a musical composition, Cage might apply the numbers dictated in a throw of the dice or incorporate the surface stains and imperfections on an otherwise blank piece of sheet music. He found inspiration for these tech- niques in Zen Buddhism, in the I jing (China’s ancient oracular Book of Changes), and in the psychic automatism of the Surrealists. Accident and chance were basic to his Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), a composition that calls for twelve radios playing simultaneously with twenty-four performers (two at each radio) randomly turning the volume and selector controls. Such antimusical music celebrates the absurd and random nature of the modern experience. At the same time, it blurs the traditional rela- tionship between composers and performers, and between artistic conception and execution. Nevertheless, despite Cage’s chance methods, each of his compositions is fully scored: even the most unconventional passages follow his explicit directions. These “scored improvisations” acknowledge the existential credo that every creative act involves choice. The decision to operate at random (whether by a roll of the dice, a toss of coins, or some other method), even the decision not to act, represents a choice.

Cage’s avant-garde methods, as publicized in his numerous essays and lectures, had an enor- mous influence on younger artists. His “chance” aesthetic inspired the international Neodada movement known as Fluxus. Fluxus artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians experimented with minimal, performance-oriented works that left the viewer to complete the work of art (see chapter 38).

Cunningham In the mid 1940s, Cage met the American choreographer Merce Cunningham (1922– 2009) and the young painter Robert Rauschenberg (1925– 2008; see chapter 37). At Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, they collaborated in staging performances that employed improvisational techniques

447Volume2

Figure 35.19 MERCE CUNNINGHAM, Summerspace, 1958. Cage became director of Cunningham’s dance company, founded in 1953. With Rauschenberg, who designed the sets and costumes for Summerspace, he and Cunningham produced some of the most innovative mixed-media performances of the predigital era.

and inventive combinations of dance, mime, poetry, music, slide projections, and film.

Cunningham’s contribution to modern choreography stems from his radical disassociation of music and dance. Rejecting the representational, storytelling dance style of his teacher, Martha Graham (see chapter 32), he concen- trated exclusively on movement and form. In a Cunningham piece, dance may proceed without music, or music may coexist with dance, but the tempo of the music may be wholly irrelevant to the movements of the dancers. Cunningham disclaims traditional dance positions and ignores traditional staging (whereby dancers are assigned to specific spaces). His choreography calls for clean, expan- sive body gestures that occupy large, spatial fields. Like a Pollock painting or a Cage composition, a Cunningham dance may unfold along a broad continuum, lacking a fixed center. It treats all body movements (even the ordinary actions of running, jumping, and falling) equally; and such movements may occur by way of improvisation or—as with the music of Cage—by chance. Nevertheless, as with Cage’s compositions, even improvisation is planned (or choreographed) by the artist.

One of Cunningham’s early works, entitled Summerspace (1958), shares the raw energy and spontaneity that typify the canvases of the Abstract Expressionists (Figure 35.19). In this multimedia piece Cunningham explores the ten- sions between chance and choice and between freedom and control, that lie at the heart of existential expression.

BK6_001-173.indd 95BK6_001-173.indd 95 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S

Glossary

Cyan Magenta Yellow Black

96

T J123-8-2009 LK

V W

D 0011 Tradition H

um anistic 6th E

dition W :220m

m x H

:292m m

175L 115 S

tora E nso M

/A M

agenta (V )

Music Listening Selections

L O O K I N G B A C K

aleatory (Latin, alea, “dice”) any kind of music composed according to chance or random procedures

geodesic dome a spherical

structure formed by lightweight elements held in tension

unprimed lacking the gesso undercoat normally applied to the surface of the canvas

The Cold War • Alienation and anxiety were two principal conditions of the

postwar mentality. • Following World War II, a contest for world domination known

as the “cold war” determined the course of international relations. Two seemingly incompatible ideologies, communism and capitalism, competed for prominence in the global arena.

• Capitalism found its roots in Adam Smith’s free market philosophy, while communism gave a central state the power to distribute wealth equally.

Existentialism • Existentialism, a humanistic philosophy formulated by Jean-Paul

Sartre, emphasized the role of individual choice in a world that lacked moral absolutes.

• Both secular and Christian Existentialism charged human beings with full responsibility for their freely chosen actions.

Literature at Mid-Century • Twentieth-century writers gave voice to the existential

challenge and to the anguish produced by the individual’s freedom to choose. Pessimists feared the destructive potential of modern technology and anticipated the demise of human freedom.

• Modern antiheroes, such as the burlesque tramps in Samuel Beckett’s theater-of-the-absurd Waiting for Godot, contend with the despair of making choices in an essentially meaningless universe. Their survival seems to depend upon an authentic commitment to action.

• Asian writers such as Rabindranath Tagore pursued the quest for meaning in parts of the world where Modernism did as much to threaten as to reshape tradition.

The Visual Arts at Mid-Century • In the visual arts, the center of gravity shifted from Paris to New

York City. The movement known as Abstract Expressionism marked a heroic effort at self-actualization through the gestural and often brutal application of paint to canvas.

• The action paintings of Jackson Pollock and the color-field paintings of Frankenthaler and Rothko explore the dynamic balance between chance and choice.

Sculpture at Mid-Century • Existential anxiety characterizes the sculptures of Alberto

Giacometti and George Segal whose figures evoke a mood of alienation, even as they occupy the crowded urban environment.

• David Smith’s large-scale works introduced industrial

techniques to abstract sculptures fabricated in iron and stainless steel.

Film at Mid-Century • Italian director Roberto Rossellini’s Neorealist style used

nonprofessional actors and on-site filming to depict reality at its fullest.

• The film noir genre dealt with the dark, moral ambiguities of the criminal world. Alfred Hitchcock thrillers focused on suspense rather than graphic violence.

• Masters of postwar films, Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman questioned traditional moral values, often using allegory to probe states of disillusion and despair.

Architecture at Mid-Century • The International Style in architecture culminated in classic

glass-box skyscrapers; despite some exceptions, these buildings reinforced the impersonal nature of the modern urban community.

• Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome and a new wave of seductive ferroconcrete buildings, exemplified in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, challenged the austerity of the International Style.

Music and Dance at Mid-Century • In the domains of music and dance, as in the visual arts, the

postwar generation took the absence of absolutes as the starting point for free experimentation.

• John Cage, the foremost member of the musical avant-garde, integrated silence, noise, and chance into his compositions.

• Merce Cunningham redefined modern dance as movement stripped of both thematic and musical associations.

448 CHAPTER 35 The Quest for Meaning

Volume2448

CD Two Selection 20 Cage, Sonata V, 1948, excerpt.

BK6_001-173.indd 96BK6_001-173.indd 96 05/12/2009 6:53 AM05/12/2009 6:53 AM

G A R R E T T , M E G A N 1 3 2 4 T S