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We have entered Post-Modernism without figuring out what Modernism was. Modernism and the European Unconscious enters this fray, vigorously arguing that Modernism was one of Freud's children, an outgrowth of the unconscious processes to which he gave access. The Modernism of artists from Kafka, Lawrence, and Proust in prose, Pirandello and Artaud in theater, or Magritte and Dali in art arose from the liberation from the shackles of conscious, rational thought.
This approach, well-argued in many of these essays, raises problems of definition germane to the discussion of Modernism. First: is it a surface or a depth? This book clearly allies Modernism with psychoanalysis, and suggests that its uniqueness as an artistic moment lay in its exploration of psychic depths. “Underlying and uniting these characteristic attitudes,” the editors write in their Preface, “was a…desire to open up uninvestigated areas of the mind—the whole mind, in its unconscious and irrational aspects, as disclosed by the new forms of depth psychology at the turn of the century” (p. xiii).
In this formulation of the book's project, editors Peter Collier and Judy Davies invoke the rhetoric of opening up depths. Yet this stance slights the extent to which Modernism was also about the surface—of the page, the canvas, or the stage. An artist like Picasso was no doubt interested in his own psychoanalytic depths, but his resulting aesthetic concerned the surface. Like such other Modernists as James Joyce in literature or Antonin Artaud in theater,