Michael Saler

‘CLAP IF YOU BELIEVE IN SHERLOCK HOLMES’: MASS CULTURE AND THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF MODERNITY, c. 1890–c. 1940

Since the late nineteenth century, Western intellectuals have tended to depict ‘modernity’ as being incompatible with ‘enchantment’. Thus Max Weber argued that two aspects intrinsic to modernity, rationalization and bureaucratization, were inimical to the magical attitudes toward human existence that characterized medieval and early modern thought. His gloomy image of the ‘iron cage’ of reason echoed the fears of earlier romantics and was to be repeated by later cultural pessimists through the twentieth century. This article recovers a different outlook that emerged during the fin-de-siecle , one that reconciled the rational and secular tenets of modernity with enchantment and that underlies many forms of contemporary cultural practice. The popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes is taken as an exemplary instance of a specifically modern form of enchantment. First, Holmess own form of rationalism, ‘animistic reason’, offered an alternative to the narrower instrumental reason that cultural pessimists claimed as a defining element of modernity. Second, many adult readers at the turn of the century and beyond were able to pretend that Holmes was real, and his creator fictitious, through the ‘ironic imagination’, a more capacious and playful understanding of the imagination than that held by the early Victorians. Both animistic reason and the ironic imagination made Holmes an iconic figure who enacted and represented the reconciliation of modernity and enchantment, whereas Doyle, unable to accept this reconciliation, resorted to spiritualism, a holdover of ‘premodern’ enchantment.

Making It New: Visual Modernism and the “Myth of the North” in Interwar England

We often associate visual modernism with cosmopolitan cities on the Continent, with pride of place going to Paris, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Munich. English visual modernism has been studied less frequently—the very phrase “English modernism” sounds like a contradiction in terms—but it too is usually linked to the cosmopolitan center of London, as well as to the notorious postimpressionist exhibitions staged there by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912. Fry coined the term “postimpressionism” to embrace the disparate styles of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and others that he introduced to a bewildered and skeptical public. Together with his Bloomsbury colleague Clive Bell, Fry defined the new art in formalist terms, arguing that works of visual art do not represent the world or depict a narrative but, rather, consist of “significant forms” that elicit “aesthetic emotions” from sensitive viewers. The two men deliberately sought to redefine art away from the moral and utilitarian aesthetic promoted by Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and William Morris. Fry and Bell intended to establish art as self-sufficient, independent from social utility or moral concerns. Fry at times expressed ambivalence about this formalist enterprise, but Bell had fewer hesitations in defining modern art as absolutely autonomous: as he stated in Art (1914), “To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.