Charles Bernstein argues that the frame of WWII was made of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. These events, symbolizing the war as a whole, caused a shock to sensibility so great that American poets and artists, speaking for people as a whole, repressed the shock through their art. He traces this repression in the poems of American writers who were children during the war. Their poems, he finds, reject large-scale conceptions and solutions. It was just such large-scale undertakings that precipitated WWII and made its execution possible.
Bernstein finds in these poets an undermining of belief in the basic values of the Enlightenment. He makes an interesting link between the poetics of the Modernists and these emerging postmodernists. He sees the post WWII poets rejecting the grandiosity and "heroic universalizing of poetic genius" still found among the Modern artists. The post WWII poets turn to particulars, to process, to detail. Bernstein, however, finds them holding onto stylistic and formal innovations from the early Modernist part of the century. But he finds them giving to these Modernist forms "an entirely different psychic registration."
For example, he contrasts the "ungeneralizable particular" in Creeley and Eigner to the "Controlling Allegories" found in the high Moderns, Pound and Eliot. He contrasts John Ashbery's "self-cancellation" to William Carlos Williams's "relaxed prerogatives" and Gertrude Stein's "exuberant hubris."
In short, Bernstein sees the post WWII poets finally cutting adrift from the lingering loyalties in Western culture to notions of transcendence, particularly the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, which found an extended lease on life in Modernist esthetics.
We find something especially authentic in Bernstein's characterization of the poets of the 1950s. He contrasts them with the baby boomers who followed them. The 50s poets do not seek larger political, social, or esthetic connections. They internalize experience. They deny; they engage in a "willed forgetting." They thus are unable to mourn. All this stands in contrast to the exuberant group orientation of the boomers and to their political activism.
We support the linkage Bernstein makes between Modernist forms and the uses to which the young poets put them after the war. There was still a respect for the hard composition of the high Moderns, but there was a fading expectation that devotion to it would yield symbolic resolution on a large scale.
It is instructive to try to show whether Bernstein's discovery in this essay lends any weight to the account of the rise of the postmodern sensibility set forth by Fredric Jameson. We think he gives direct evidence to support the Jamesonian view of the periodization of the postmodern.
The PROGRAMME essay on Hiroshima, To Bear the Unbearable, addresses the sensibility generated in the young mind by World World II in a vein similar to Bernstein's.
Charles Bernstein's examination of the post WWII poets helps us understand Commandment V in the Ten Commandments of the Postmodern.