Modernism (Un)bound

Every term comes with baggage, yet none carries a heavier load than modernism, to the point of bringing discourse and scholarship alike to a critical standstill. From this impasse, a rethinking of modernism's ‘tragic’ aspect indexes the cautionary tale of an archaic figure who epitomises it: Prometheus. From the sheer rebellion against the tyranny of orthodoxy for the sake of humanity, to the conditions under which the consequential suffering takes place in the short run, the fable reverberates in the modernist thrust to go forward with an implied view to ‘make’ the future, while breaking away from the past. Still, the oft-mentioned modernist rupture (of modernity) is never ‘total’ – if anything, it is the aggregation and eventual explosion of the past knowledge into something wonderfully novel. Further still, as much as Prometheus harmonises with the modernist ethos, he throws the pathos of modernity into sharp relief too: for his fire can either translate into, say, BLAST, or morph into an atom bomb. It is here that the Promethean parable unfolds into what Gunther Anders aptly deems ‘Promethean shame’, to strike one amidst many tragic notes on a global scale by directing focus to how humankind returns the favour in the long run. Prometheus, thus bound to the consequences of his actions, recedes into the background and continues to keep watch in the distant past, even after undergoing the pecks of the eagle and subsequently being released from shackles.

The blend of this allegory into the present wager on the spatio-temporal transmission of theatrical modernism harks back to the once meaningful, now all-too-familiar charges levelled at modernism, specifically in the wake of Jean-Francois Lyotard's memorable critique of its ‘nostalgia for the lost narrative’. That this muster call to abolish each and every master/meta-narrative has become – or, as Fredric Jameson insinuates in his foreword to Lyotard's ‘report’, was – a historical grand narrative to begin with does not necessarily negate its contribution to the emancipation of modernist studies from the bonds of reductionism and conservatism in the long haul.