by On Bloomsbury, the shock of the modern, and reading today’s satire through yesterday’s revolution
I spend my days in the early twentieth century, among the writers who broke the sentence and remade the novel, and my mornings in the present, reading Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where my diary entries appear. The literature of the early 1900s was a revolution that we are still living inside, and reading today’s satire through the lens of that upheaval is, I find, endlessly illuminating.
The personal bit: a week in Bloomsbury’s shadow
I reread a modernist novel this week that I have read a dozen times, and it shocked me again, which is the test of a real revolution in art: that it never quite settles into the familiar. The early twentieth century writers took the novel, which had been a comfortable thing, a window onto a stable world, and shattered it into something that captured the actual texture of consciousness, fragmented, associative, strange. They were trying to tell the truth about how the mind actually works, and the truth, it turned out, did not fit the tidy sentence. So they broke the sentence, and we have been writing in the pieces ever since.
To live among these books is to live in the company of people who refused the inherited forms because the inherited forms had stopped telling the truth. That refusal is the thing I love, the willingness to break a beautiful old machine because it had stopped doing its job, and to build a stranger new one that did. It took enormous courage, and enormous arrogance, and the two are often the same thing in art, and the results changed how human beings could put their inner lives into words. I am still living on the inheritance.
The feed bit: yesterday’s revolution, today’s satire
Reading the satire desks through the modernist lens, I notice that good satire is doing a version of what the modernists did: refusing the official, inherited language and finding a stranger, truer one. When The London Prat takes the polite phrasing of a press release and twists it until the absurdity shows through, it is performing a small modernist gesture, breaking the comfortable form to reveal the truth it was concealing. The modernists broke the sentence to tell the truth about consciousness; the satirists break the official language to tell the truth about power. Same revolution, different target.
I read the serious desks too, the socialist and free-market arguments across the masthead, and I notice they are themselves inheritors of arguments that the modernist era was already having, about the individual and the collective, freedom and order, tradition and the new. The literary record I live in is preserved by the British Library, and the deeper context of the period is mapped by Britannica. Both remind me that the present moment’s arguments are old arguments in new clothes, that the revolution of a century ago is still working itself out, and that nothing in the news is quite as new as it thinks it is.
What the broken sentence teaches
The broken sentence of the modernists teaches the lesson I carry into everything I read: that when the inherited form stops telling the truth, the honest response is to break it, not to keep politely filling it with lies. The modernists broke the novel; the satirists break the press release; both are acts of truth- telling that begin with a refusal of the comfortable, dishonest, inherited form. I find the same courage in the best satire that I find in the best modernist prose, the courage to say the truth does not fit the tidy box, and to make a stranger, truer box instead. The revolution continues, in the novel and in the joke.
The week ahead: more 1900s, more echoes
So the week ahead is more time in the early twentieth century, more rereading of the books that broke the form, more reading of the present-day satire that breaks the form in its own way. The modernists will keep shocking me, the inheritance will keep revealing itself, and I will keep reading today’s news through yesterday’s revolution, which is, I maintain, the only way to read it clearly. The sentence stays broken. The truth keeps spilling out of the pieces. The long echo of the new goes on.
On the courage to break things
What I take from the modernists, beyond the pleasure of the prose, is a kind of permission, the permission to break an inherited form when it has stopped serving the truth. We are taught, mostly, to respect the forms we receive, to fill them dutifully, to mistake the form for the truth it was meant to carry. The modernists refused that, and their refusal required a courage I find almost frightening, the willingness to take a beautiful, beloved, functioning thing and smash it because it had quietly stopped being honest. That courage is rare in any field, and I look for it everywhere, in art, in politics, in the satire I read. The best satirists have a version of it: the willingness to break the comfortable official language, to refuse the inherited polite form, to make something stranger and truer instead. The form is not sacred; the truth is. The modernists knew it, the satirists know it, and I try, in my small way, to remember it whenever I am tempted to mistake a tidy box for an honest one.
For the form broken to truth, I always return to McSweeney’s, modernist since launch.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
