“In all history there is no analogous case of one Culture making a passionate cult of the memory of another.” (Spengler 1926, 30)

1When a collection of essays entitled Renascent Joyce appeared about ten years ago, reviewers commented on the productive ambiguity of the word “renascent,” an adjective that foregrounds “the theme of creative renewal” across “more than one age and civilization” while recalling that “the spirit of the Renaissance is deeply linked to modernism” (Levin 2015, 178). In the wake of these Joycean essays, but expanding their approach to include a wider array of writers and artists, this issue of Sillages critiques, entitled (Re)Nascent Modernisms, also plays on this ambiguity astutely, inviting us to read Modernism both as ‘creative renewal’ in general and more specifically as a renaissance of the Renaissance.

2The parallel seems all the more justified as the Modernist period coincided with the great age of Renaissance studies, ushered in by Jules Michelet’s La Renaissance (1855) and Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and illustrated by the great generation of Viennese and German art historians that included Julius von Schlosser, Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. In tune with their studies and sometimes stimulated by them, Modernist fascination with the Renaissance was enhanced rather than limited by the difficulty in defining the period. As Kurt W. Forster points out: “To some it was the age of warring city-states and lawless condottieri; to others it was the age of religious painting or of the idolatry of art” (Forster 1999, 4). And to others still, like Graham Greene’s antihero Harry Lime, who attempts to carve a criminal empire for himself on the ruins of post-World War II Vienna, these two contrasting aspects were inextricably entwined:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. (The Third Man, Greene 1948)

3Lime, played with panache by Orson Welles (who is rumored to have written these lines himself), not only makes a statement about past history but also presents himself as an avatar of the bloody but brilliant Borgias. The example may obliquely symbolize what Forster calls the “double perspectival leap” implicit in Renaissance studies (and in Modernism), whereby “modernity is to Renaissance as Renaissance is to antiquity” (Forster 1999, 4), with each age looking for itself in the mirror of the previous one.

4Such correspondences lead (Re)Nascent Modernisms to stress, in a recurrent trope, the “dialectical embrace of repetition and renewal” (Janus and Lopoukhine) that is at the heart of Modernist texts and results in a circular relationship between the present and the past they return to, or that returns in them—whether it belongs to the sphere of private experience, as with the “promise of childhood” that both Woolf and Benjamin seek to “reignite” (Di Biaso); or to the literary tradition, as in Woolf’s feminist reworking of Milton’s “Lycidas” (Laniel) or May Sinclair’s appropriation of Romantic poetry (De Bont); or to political history, as illustrated by Ezra Pound’s belief that the age of Malatesta was reborn in/as Mussolini’s fascist state (Georges), a belief ironically echoed in Harry Lime’s self-perception as a renascent Borgia. More generally, cycles and recyclings inform Modernist works on all levels, from Spengler’s massive, and massively influential (though now largely forgotten), representation of the rise and fall of cultures in Decline of the West (1918-1922) to Mina Loy’s more discreet reuse of refuse in her assemblages and collages (Drouin). The circular aesthetic economies of Modernism are also abundantly illustrated by the works symbolizing its annus mirabilis, Ulysses and The Waste Land, the former burying a Homeric scheme beneath the surface of its modern Dublin narrative, the latter spouting fragments of past literatures and religions in mutilated and sometimes monstrous forms, problematizing its relationship to the past by reconfiguring it as a return of the repressed in the guise of an uncanny other: “–But who is that on the other side of you?” (Eliot 2015, 69). As suggested by this ambivalent line, the Modernist present may appear either as the fulfilment of a prophetic past or as an airy nothing; as Jesus resurrected, appearing to his disciples on the road to Emmaus, or as a mere optical illusion. Such an ambivalence defines the paradoxical temporalities of Modernism, oscillating between plenitude and depletion, between the epiphanies of Joyce’s early fiction on the one hand and, on the other, the failed kairos of Samuel Beckett’s works, which cry out “for forms and stations, and for apocalypse” but only obtain “vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx” (Kermode 2000, 115).

5Such apocalyptic impulses were enhanced by the turbulences of an age framed by two world wars, a world crisis, and the rise of totalitarian states, which destroyed President Wilson’s millennial project of a reborn world peace, crushed radical artists’ and writers’ hopes in the revolution and ended with their realization, in a cruel historical anagnorisis, that the Modernist Renaissance had turned out to be, like the Middle Ages for the Renaissance people, a “sad interlude, ‘the Time Between’” (Gombrich 1989, 167). Thus Arthur Koestler in 1939, coming upon “the inconspicuous Havas message on the third page of the Eclaireur du Sud-Est, saying that a treaty of non-aggression had been signed between Germany and the Soviet,” and understanding that “we had all been taken in all right in the greatest farce the world had ever seen” (Koestler 1941, 22, 25). And, like him, and like Beckettian characters, many Modernist writers would suddenly find themselves similarly stranded in ‘the Time Between,’ the heralds of a Renaissance that would never come to pass or, in Wyndham Lewis’s striking formula, “the first men of a future that never materialized” (Lewis 1982, 256).

6However, despite these grim reversals of fortune, the parallel between Modernism and the Renaissance still makes a lot of sense, not least because it has bequeathed to us a renewed art of reading. As Hugh Kenner notes in a chapter (aptly entitled “Renaissance II”) of The Pound Era, Modernism, following late-19^th century archaeological discoveries, triggered “a renaissance of attention” (Kenner 1972, 69) that is still with us. Modernist writers, with the help of primers like Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” ([1917], Eliot 2014), Pound’s How to Read (1931) or Gertrude Stein’s Narration (1935), have taught us to read texts with the kind of attention reserved to archaeological fragments. And so, illustrating “the dialectical embrace of repetition and renewal” (Janus and Lopoukhine) in literature and the arts, these continue to come alive under our eyes, conjuring up the aura of worlds lost in the past or, as in Lewis’s paradoxical vision, in an unborn future:

You handle with curiosity and reverence a fragment belonging to some civilization developed three milleniums ago. Why cannot you treat the future with as much respect? Even if the future is such a distant one that the thing you hold in your hand or the picture you look at has something of the mutilation that the fragment coming from the past also has, is not the case a similar one? […]
The future possesses its history as well as the past, indeed. All living art is the history of the future. (Lewis 1922, 36)