Afterwhim

Abstract Casting a look back at modernism from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, Hugh Kenner writes that the ‘life of the live part is generally the life of whimsy’. It is hard to know what he means by this since even if we may meaningfully identify a ‘live part’ it may not be the same ‘live part’ that Kenner has identified, while ‘generally’ again lets the weasel run off in the mist uncaught. It is also unclear what Kenner means by ‘whimsy’. Empson was apparently too silly for him—a flimsy ‘spider-web’ with range but no depth, an ‘unmeaning’ surface, ‘undergraduate fun’. But if Kenner’s statement is useless as literary criticism it does nonetheless reliably convey his era’s nostalgia for an atmosphere of creative license that modernism sustained which faded as the opportunities for avant-garde publication ebbed. The work of accommodating radical literary ingenuity, which often meant accommodating whims, now fell to an immense but poorly funded and often hard to come by paraphernalia of pamphlets, chapbooks, and the occasional luxurious limited edition. In the meantime, the drifts of experimental writing that found their way into mainstream literature became jaded and furtive. This concluding chapter is about the life of whim in the contemporary moment, and whether it can feasibly have one.