Jack Dudley TRANSCENDENCE AND THE END OF MODERNIST AESTHETICS: DAVID JONES'S IN PARENTHESIS nihil vacuum neque sine signo apud Deum. -Irenaeus C ONCERNING form in twentieth-century modernism, the century split along two central streams. These larger tributaries forked along the artist's ability to control the materials at hand and, in turn, the capacity of art to convey the reality of experience. This was the crisis of representation, perhaps the central problem of modernist aesthetics. Could the tools and conventions of realism, naturalism, and mimesis passed on from Victorian predecessors capture the new moment of the twentieth cen- tury? Could one subjective individual, the artist, give an adequate represen- tation of modern experience, of movement, dynamism, and a world newly understood as in constant flux? James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound represent one broad strand in the Anglophone world's literary response to this problem. In their response, the artist controls the sources he sum- mons and marshals them to an aesthetic end all his own. The literature they produced is often a sustained, dense, and difficult treatment, in the maxi- mal, encyclopedic novel and the long or epic poem. This first stream, an essential, perhaps the representative, component of the broader modern- ist idiom, would be adopted and adapted throughout the century and into today by Flann O'Brien, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, and Derek Walcott. The second stream is quite the opposite, and is best represented by Samuel Beckett, who described it in direct contrast to Joyce. As James Knowlson recounts, Beckett said his fellow Irishman had "gone as far as one could" in terms of "knowing more" and being in "control of one's material" (319). For Beckett, the way was "impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than adding" (319). This second stream is spare, exact, minimalist. It relinquishes control, and is largely negative, casting a colder eye on the world. Harold Pinter, John Banville, J. M. Coetzee, and philosophers like Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida all followed from Beckett's lead. The first stream tended toward self-annotation, the second averred. The effect of the two formal choices cannot be overstated: for, just as the two split along stylistic lines, so they did in temperament and tone. The first tended to the celebratory .2 (Winter 2013) 103