cultural studies
Don Anderson
Peter Conrad
Modern Times, Modern Places:
Life & Art in the 20th Century
Thames and Hudson $59.95hb, 752pp, 0 500 01877 4
IN HIS PREFACE to Modern Times, Modern Places , 'On Being a Middle-Aged Child of Our Times' (one can be confident that the
allusion to Tippett's 1941 oratorio is meant), the
Tasmanian-born and, since a Rhodes scholarship excused him from
his conscription to Vietnam in that annus mirabilis 1968,
Oxford-domiciled Peter Conrad comes as close as he will anywhere
in his 752 pages to articulating a thesis and a methodology for
this democratically copious book.
What I have written is not quite a cultural history. Certainly
it does not set out to enumerate and extol the most significant
works of art produced in our century. Rather it is about the ways
in which life has changed during the last hundred years, and it
looks to art -- since artists are the interpreters of their age
and also its memorialists -- for evidence of those changes. My
concern is with high culture, because its artefacts stay around
to be investigated... Modernity is about the acceleration of
time, and also the dispersal of places. The book starts by describing the modern panic about time. It goes on to identify a series of places which are citadels of modern society in its different phases.
Vienna, Moscow, Paris, Berlin, New York, Tokyo. (Where is Mexico City?)
Aspects of Conrad's 'generic plot' for the twentieth century are: the Holocaust, the Bomb, Relativity and its discontents, the 'consumerist culture of surplus and leisure' in the last third of 'our' century, the threatened destruction of planet Earth. While Conrad is unhappy with the term 'post-modern' except insofar as it may be used of architecture, his book is in some significant ways itself post-modern -- in, for example, its eschewing any strong organising thesis, in its dominant technique of (undocumented) quotation, paraphrase, and collage rather than argument, in the emergence of Andy Warhol as one of the most significant witnesses to Modernity and its 'irrevocable breach with the past'. And surely the image with which Conrad concludes his preface would serve any Baudrillardian well: 'The approach to Kai Tik airport [at Hong Kong] is so unnerving that they show you a virtual version of it first, on a videotape inside the plane: technology pre-empts the experience itself.'
Since this journal is an Australian book review, it seems appropriate to confess that Conrad's book reminds me of nothing so much as a Xmas Pudding, and a Magic Xmas Pudding at that. It is full to bursting with coins and preserved fruit of information, it is heady with the brandy sauce of a singular intellect, and it is seemingly inexhaustible. Plums include: the person Lenin most wanted to meet was Charlie Chaplin; Chaplin considered suing Hitler for violating his copyright in aping the Little Tramp's moustache; Gertrude Stein acquired a wrist-watch at the age of seventy only when the Nazi curfew in Paris required absolute punctuality. While reading this book at times reminded me of playing Super Mario '64, it is perhaps more generically appropriate to say that Conrad's manner of address reminds me of no one so much as Robert Hughes or Clive James not only in their enthusiastic breathlessness, but in the urge of representatives of the European antipodes to celebrate the richness of the Other, to explain Europe and America to the locals.
If Modern Times, Modern Places seems, at some times and in certain places, difficult to assess, that may be because, to invoke the first clause of Goethe's tripartite judgment of a work of art, it is difficult to know what it is. In size, range, learning, and density, the book recalls nothing so much as the great novels of the century with which it is concerned: those world-embracing and world-creating and God (who is dead, anyhow) -rivalling works by Proust, and Mann, and Joyce, and Musil, and Pynchon, and Gaddis, for example. Perhaps it might be best to regard it under the rubric which Roland Barthes offered in his 'autobiography': 'Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman.' ('It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.')
One thing it most definitely is not, is a doctoral thesis, not even a post-modern doctoral thesis. At 730,000 words it is, under current regulations, the equivalent of ten Ph.D. theses, and far more reader-friendly than most in this Age of Jargon. Yet some aspects of this book did raise my thesis-examiner's hackles. Most significantly, the book provides no documentation or bibliography, and this absence is not addressed in the 'Notes on Etiquette and Acknowledgments'. I happen to be of the opinion that acknowledging your intellectual debts is a kind of etiquette. The lack of documentation causes at least two concerns. How is one to follow up information that one finds interesting?