Antiphonal Arts

This chapter considers how the literary representation of time after World War II was shaped by intersections with music and the visual arts. Taking its title from Djuna Barnes’s verse drama The Antiphon (1958), it argues that an antiphonal quality was implicit within works of canonical modernism, which similarly involve interplays between proposition and response, high and low. It suggests how a similar kind of recursive pattern informs Samuel Beckett’s narratives, organized as they are around a dialectic between nostalgia for the sublime and a cathexis of bathos. In relation to Patrick White’s burlesque styles, it argues that this can be seen not as marginal to constructions of modernism, but as endemic to modernism’s antiphonal arts. It also considers the mutual influences of White and Australian painter Sidney Nolan, while discussing the significance of the latter’s collaboration with Boston poet Robert Lowell.