The Aesthetics of Failure in Anglo-American Modernist Literature

I examine literary works that are instructive not because they imagine ways to transcend bourgeois alienation, but because they articulate and engage the frustrations encountered when seeking this transcendence. Using as a touchstone Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, I argue that the emotional complexity of these frustrations cannot be captured by conventional plot-driven narratives. Instead, the authors I treat---T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf---produce formal experiments that dramatize the social dynamics in which they are caught and the anxieties they experience in trying to resist them. By culling this anxiety and critical self-awareness from the formal quality of their work, I can tell a story of literary modernism that anticipates the tenets of criticism now directed retrospectively against it. These authors do not abandon political and economic concerns for a utopian or elitist aesthetics. Rather, they critique the naive and dishonest political machinery of both the left and the right, a vast network of institutional and psychic mechanisms that unknowingly perpetuates the very social forces it professes to despise. Having sharpened the contours of a capitalist culture nourished by forces which try to resist it, these authors cannot offer any definitive or positive solutions for the problems they raise. Instead, they foreground the failure to realize their own ideals. I argue that this aesthetic of failure (not to be confused with aesthetic failure) is designed to force the reader into a reflective attitude, to alienate him imaginatively from his own real alienation so as to generate awareness of the mechanisms which enable it.