Metamodernism
Short Story
“I would love to have been at 29 May 1913. The exclusion of the moment would have just been spectacular.”
“What was on 29th May 1913.”
“At the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the original. It was the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps. Some reports said there was a near riot.”
“Come I think that is a little bit…” and I hesitated, “extreme?”
“That’s why I want to know. It was in a real sense the birth of the modernist movement. And all that implies.”
“What does it imply to you?”
“I don’t know what it actually implied that’s why I want to feel to experience all of the torment of emotions running rampant through the streets.”
“Now I think you’re being a bit extreme. Modernism is now in the past. ”
“The very far past. Indeed, that is why I want to get the flavor of those heady days when something new has struck the world. To get a sense of how to react to something that I do know what the outcome is so that I will understand how what I don’t know comes charging down. Think about all of the small journals that I haven’t heard of in one of them is producing something wondrous. Think about 1917 and Prufrock. There was an opening which is shocking.”
“I think your brain is too large for me to have to step back and explain. I try not to think about anything related to T.S. Eliot he’s so old.”
“That he was new at the time. And that would give me some guide to what is new right now. think about the fact that a poet, a composer, a writer of novellas is right now working someplace, and I don’t even know it. The old establishment has collapsed and produces nothing but saleswothy dreck.”
“They always produced sales-worthy dreck. That is their business. People with money do not tend to have avant-garde tastes. It is probably in the description.”
“But in the corners even though they tried to hide it there was something novel in a few things that they let out into the world. Now there’s too much money to be doing things important.”
“Let’s say that I agree with you. Where would you think of looking?”
“That's where I am at a loss. When there is literally no money for the new…”
I cut him off. “There is only the money for things that say they are new but have nothing new in them.”
“Precisely. The things that say they are new but have nothing new in them pronounce greatly on nothing. That’s why I want to look forward to say 75 years and what is really new not ersatz new or faux new.”
“Why can’t you search for it today?”
“I worry that I would be like people who planned the riot in 1913. I think they thought that their vision of what was new was really something that was old with varnish taken off or put back on. They didn’t want the new. And certainly not the new one played rather badly. They wanted new to be comfortable.”
“Surely you would know what ‘new’ is.”
“Probably only by my repulsion for everything new about it. Think of something: many of the Modernists were also conservative or even reactionary. Schoenburg, Dégas, Pound. All deeply conservative or even reactionary. The radical Soviet Union was ardent in its devotion to that which was heretically, even hermetically, and pedantically backward-looking. The reserves of reaction in politics often had a deeply conservative notion of what new was really about.”
“Hitler was reactionary.”
“Yes, but some of his followers such as Weber and Nolde were extremely progressive in their artistic sense while being reactionary in their political sense.”
“And were banned.”
“Indeed so. That is why political and artistic sensibilities are completely devoid of their orthogonality. It does not help you to be a Marxist if you are at the same time deeply conservative in your artistic tastes.”
“You haven’t answered why you would not hark to the new.”
“I have studied Modernism, postmodernism, and movements that go beyond post-post. And what I know is that once something is truly established, then people like me can critique and adopt it. But I can feel in my bones that I would probably react as horrified while the ink was still on the presses.”
“You may have a point I mean ‘it still on the presses’ is an old ideal and old expression. If you see what I mean.”
“Precisely, we have Ph. D. in fuddy-duddy. I had this dread that I would be among the people planning the right rather than the people praising the new music which we heard for the first time on the 29th of May 1913.”
Then he reached up to the tall towers that pervade commercialism and consumerism on that block of Mass Ave. Cars were waiting at the red and green lights. And I realized at that precise second that the car, the light, the truck, all of the things that we wore, each one of them was at some point in time ‘new’ and most people look down on them until someone with the sense of money decided to sell them the new thing even if the people with money did not appreciate what they were selling. After all, money has no allegiance. However, I think that at my time at the Museum of Fine Arts, even money was something new. I caught a glance at the Symphony Hall and wondered how long truly new music would have to late before the purveyors of taste would realize that they were losing money by promoting what is old and eschewing that which is new. After all, metamodernism might just be a fad to sell old suits in new cans. I did not have any opinion on the matter.
The towers were silent because as towers they did not have much opinion on what was truly new and what was falsely false.