Rereading the New Criticism

ions, were surrendering their tickets and passing through the barriers. Hammond, “Through Fields of Cacophonous Modern Masters” • 165 Others were on the steps, going down, coming up, stationary, peering at each other like half-blinded birds and setting up a hideous whirr, as of flying feathers and boastful wings. (401) If the “improvement” they seek is more substantive than the “status” that draws the ladies to the MoMA, these young people have come to the wrong place. Already comfortable with the “abstractions” of modernist form, no longer faced with the shock of a contemporary phenomenon but rather in the presence of Kramer’s canonized “art-historical formalism,” the MoMA’s guests are reduced to the sort of mechanized slavery from which Baldwin in 1949 believed modernism would save its audience: once inside the museum, they too become mindless puppets, following whatever pre-determined paths the MoMA’s hallways offer. If they sought an aesthetic capable of reaching beyond the museum’s walls and effecting positive change in the city, they get instead the despair of a modernism paradoxically displayed only to mourn and reject the urban. Showing herself an adept New Critical reader of modernism, Cass looks at the aforementioned “large and violent canvas in greens and reds and blacks” and tells Eric almost immediately, “I’m beginning to think . that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet” (405). In a passage that cannot escape the tint of meta-commentary, Cass responds wearily to Eric’s question, “You think that there isn’t any hope for us? ”: “‘Hope? ’ The word seemed to bang from wall to wall. ‘Hope? No, I don’t think there’s any hope. We’re too empty here’—her eyes took in the Sunday crowd—‘too empty—here’” (406). “Here,” amidst the claustrophobic echoes of the Museum of Modern Art, and “here,” in Baldwin’s modernism-denouncing-yet-modernist Book Three, modernism stages its own defeat. Again evincing complicity with the aesthetic it attacks, Another Country ends by enacting exactly that which it criticizes, producing a bitterly ironic New Critical modernist representation of the city. The final chapter of Book Three and of Another Country begins with Yves’s airplane approaching New York: The sun struck, on steel, on bronze, on stone, on glass, on the gray water far beneath them, on the turret tops and flashing windshields of crawling cars, on the incredible highways, stretching and snarling and turning for mile upon mile upon mile, on the houses, square and high, low and gabled, and on their howling antennae, on the sparse, weak trees, and on those towers, in the distance, of the city of New York. (432) 166 • Part II, Chapter 7 The insistent alliterations on harsh “s” and “z” sounds (“sun,” “struck,” “steel,” “bronze,” “stone,” “glass”) combined with the passage’s hard, cold, and sharp imagery of “steel,” “turret tops,” “flashing windshields,” and “howling antennae,” produce a tableau as verbally violent and alienating as the most garish abstract canvas. The city’s “incredible highways,” which stretch vortex-like “snarling and turning for mile upon mile upon mile,” baffle the comprehension. From the air, the city is an abstraction, populated not by people but by anthropomorphized metonyms: “crawling cars. ” Fittingly, then, Another Country, a book that succeeds in identifying the problem with its own aesthetic mode but remains powerless to address it, concludes on a note of resigned and indignant sarcasm: “and he,” the innocent and unknowing foreigner Yves, “strode through the barriers, more high-hearted than he had even been as a child, into that city which the people from heaven had made their home” (436).