Modernity reconsidered GYORGY BODN/~tR M O D E R N I T Y R E C O N S I D E R E D I am pleased to welcome the participants at the third conference of Bayreuth University and the Institute of Literary Studies o f the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and I am happy to verify the in- volvement o f Prcs University in our decennial cooperation. I d o n ' t think I need to overemphasize the importance o f this cooperation in terms of the spiritual and intellectual opening it represents. The given historical circumstances under which Hungarians have been compelled to live in the past few decades make the setting up and organization of such a series of conferences a true achievement. I have always believed in it and I fully believe in its future too. Naturally, the continuity of our cooperation has not depended solely on our intentions. It is hardly possible to maintain a scien- tific programme unless it undertakes the task of clarifying real re- search problems. I believe in our attempts to do so with precision. I am convinced of the fact that the history of literature is a dia- logue and this dialogue is the confrontation of different historical situations and interpretations. Consequently classical modernity - - the first turning point of twentieth century literature - - is not only a counterpart o f postmodernism, but its prehistory, too. Classical i or aesthetical - - modernity had as its central topics the depress- ing conflicts of art and life, imagination and reality, reflection and vitality. Although when qualifying the conflict of art and life as depressing, we call into question the family relationship between the Modern and the Postmodern paradigm, however, we do .not exclude the justification of raising this question. Tracing back Post- modernism is not an unauthorized act even if it leads us to discover Neohelicon XXI/1 Akad~miai Kiadr, Budapest John Benjamins B. V., Amsterdam 10 GYORGY BODNAR negative answers. But in this tracing back the system's theoretical line of argumentation, which states that every system is completely valid only i.n itself, may help us; thus, a reply formulating the re- conciliation o f the conflict between life and art is as much a symp- tom of a hopeless fight for completeness as the conception o f au- tonomy in Postmodernism. It is a point to take into consideration that this autonomy wishes to construe itself upon the deconstructed role o f the writer and Aristotelian-mimetic poetics, as well as upon the maintenance o f the intertextual state of creation, and upon the abandoning of causal teleology. That is, it wishes to construe itself on answers which, in the absence of the issues of the aesthetics o f mimesis, would land in an infinite space without any points o f reference. It is not to say that their validity should be called into question, just a warning that these questions and replies are com- ponents o f a historical process, and they do not contain their truth- fulness in themselves; this lies, instead, in the historical process. If Modernism and Postmodernism have a common denominator, it must be the desire for the autonomy of art. And if there is a para- digm change between the two, it appears in the struggle against the principle o f mimesis: the characteristic Post-Modern work is about itself, that is, it presents the consciousness attached to itself as a form exact in the process of elaboration. But if it is true, as a pure formula, that the autonomous work can define itself only after its completion, why should we expect that the literary process leading to autonomy to take a teleological form? Almost every trait of the work liberated from the constraints of mimesis appears in a more or less pure form as of the beginnings of Modernism. Besides those that I have mentioned, here we find devices such as the overt admission of fictionality, abandoning the rational causality principle, and as a consequence, challenging the rational epic reliability, as well as the degradation of the role o f the plot and the ragged and open structure; all these devices contrib- uted to the development of the Modernist poetics of the novel, a poetics sceptical about the truth of nineteenth century Realism. The MODERNITY RECONSIDERED 11 work, then, was led to an intertextual position, where the text is not a realization o f a teleology any more, but rather a relation and a phenomenon o f progressive nature. And this very strategy is hid- den in the narrative mode which does not yet aim at aimlessness but crosses the borderlines o f representation and information, and wishes to translate the colours, the music and the spiritual essences which have no r o o m in the boxes o f conceptions. And one should also mention the problem o f literary language. This problem has haunted verbal art from the very beginnings but it was in m u c h greater emphasis through the ideal o f autonomous literature, at the time o f the birth o f M o d e m i s m than in the earlier conceptions o f literature. The closed system o f everyday language must have been rendered open not only by Post-Modem literature; every work gen- erating its single motives b y its literariness makes use o f language as another system which strives to block the automatism o f every- day communication, in order to t u m the attention towards the world o f experiences beyond conceptions, and in order to represent - - to use Endre A d y ' s beautiful and exact phrasing - - the halo round the m o o n o f words. The historical connection between the M o d e m and the Post- M o d e m can be discovered not only in devices and poetic princi- ples but also in the underlying ideas and issues o f the age. It is well known that philosophical scepticism and alienation h a v e already motivated M o d e m ambitions, and although these ambitions did not incline the hierarchized world view o f the nineteenth century to take anarchy upon themselves, they presented, from the time o f Impressionism, only a nonhierarchized world representation as valid. As can b e seen, the debates about Post-Modernism have con- vinced m e to take the side o f those who do not want to reduce the importance o f the new motivations behind Post-Modernism but are reluctant to oppose in a dogmatical way Modernism and Post-Mod- ernism. 12 GYORGY BODN/~,R I hope my opening remarks have convinced you of the fact that this conference is not only an exchange of abstract ideas, but the confrontation of the principles and methods for research into the whole of twentieth century literature, which includes the require- ment of universality.