The New Modernist Studies 1108732143, 9781108732147
This is the first book specifically devoted to the new modernist studies. Bringing together a range of perspectives on t
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Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Series information
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Contents
List of
Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The New Modernist Studies
Modernist and Other Studies
Modernist Studies Studies
Modernism contra Studies
Notes
I Histories
Chapter 1 History's Prehistory: Modernist Studies before the New
I
II
III
IV
Notes
Chapter 2 Scholarship's Turn: Origins and Effects of the New Modernist Studies
Modernist Studies Association and Conference
Modernist Publishing: Modernism/modernity and Modernist Book Series
How New Is New?
Notes
II Horizons
Chapter 3 Planetarity's Edges: Modernist Studies and the Bounds of Modernism
Versions of ''Planetarity''
Planetarity as Practice: How (Not) to Read Otherness
Friedman's Planetary Modernisms and the Shifting Boundaries of Modernism
Literary Influence, Linguistic Expertise, and the Routes into and out of Paris: The Case of Spanish American modernismo
Notes
Chapter 4 Religion's Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
Contemporary Religious Studies
Religion in Comparative Modernisms
Gora and A Passage to India
Huda Shaarawi and H.D.
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 5 Disability's Disruptions: Embodiment and the New Modernist Studies
Modernist Disability Studies
Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Bowen's House in Paris
Bowen's ''Look at All Those Roses''
Disability's Disruptions
Notes
Chapter 6 Affect's Vocabularies: Literature and Feeling after 1890
Archives of Affect
Style as Transformation
Against Interiority
Feeling for the Facts, Reading beyond Compassion
Notes
Chapter 7 Invisibility's Arts: The Seen and the Unseen in Modernism and Modernist Studies
Notes
Chapter 8 Black Writing's Visuals: African American Modernism in Nugent, Ligon, and Rankine
Nugent: Material ''Smoke''
Ligon and Rankine: Intertextuality and the American Landscape
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 9 Noir Film's Soundtracks: Jazz, Black Transnationalism, and Postcolonial Genres of Criminality
Liner Notes: ''Overhearing''
A-Side: Miles and Malle: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
B-Side: Melville, Martial and Solal: Deux hommes dans Manhattan
Notes
Chapter 10 Language's Hopes: Global Modernism and the Science of Debabelization
Engineering Dreams
Modernist Dream Books
Notes
Chapter 11 Revolution's Demands: Modernism, Socialist Realism, and the Manifesto
Notes
Chapter 12 Feminism's Archives: Mina Loy, Anna Mendelssohn, and Taxonomy
Notes
Chapter 13 Risk's Instruments: Speculation, Futurity, and Modernist Finance
Modernism and Risk Society
Finance, Futurity, and Modernist Speculators
Speculative Fiction and the Risks of Race: George Schuyler's Black No More (1931)
Notes
Chapter 14 Deep Time's Hauntings: Modernism and Alternative Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Citation preview
THE NEW MODERNIST STUDIES
This is the first book specifically devoted to the new modernist studies. Bringing together a range of perspectives on the past, present, and future of this vibrant, complicated scholarly enterprise, the collection reconsiders its achievements and challenges as both a mode of inquiry and an institutional formation. In its first section, the volume offers a fresh history of the new modernist studies’ origins amid the intellectual configurations of the end of the twentieth century and changing views of the value, influence, and scope of modernism. In the second section, a dozen leading scholars examine recent trends in modernist scholarship to suggest possible new paths of research, showing how the field continues to engage with other areas of study and how it makes a case for the ongoing meaning of modernist literature and art in the contemporary world. is Russ Family Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production () and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature – () as well as the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (). A past president of the Modernist Studies Association, he has held a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and currently serves as Series Editor of Hopkins Studies in Modernism.
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This series addresses two main themes across a range of key authors, genres, and literary traditions. The first is the changing critical interpretations that have emerged since c. . Radically new interpretations of writers, genres, and literary periods have emerged from the application of new critical approaches. Substantial scholarly shifts have occurred too, through the emergence of new editions, editions of letters, and competing biographical accounts. Books in this series collate and reflect this rich plurality of twenty-first-century literary critical energies, and wide varieties of revisionary scholarship, to summarize, analyze, and assess the impact of contemporary critical strategies. Designed to offer critical pathways and evaluations, and to establish new critical routes for research, this series collates and explains a dizzying array of criticism and scholarship in key areas of twenty-first-century literary studies. Recent Titles in this Series: The New Feminist Studies The New Hemingway Studies The New Irish Studies The New Edith Wharton Studies The New Ezra Pound Studies The New Walt Whitman Studies
THE NEW MODERNIST STUDIES DOUGLAS MAO Johns Hopkins University
University Printing House, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Anson Road, #–/, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mao, Douglas, - editor. Title: The new modernist studies / edited by Douglas Mao. Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Series: Twenty-firstcentury critical revisions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN (print) | LCCN (ebook) | ISBN (hardback) | ISBN (paperback) | ISBN (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature) | Modernism (Art) Classification: LCC PN.M N (print) | LCC PN.M (ebook) | DDC /.–dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ ---- Hardback ---- Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For my teachers, with special love to Helaine Levi Smith
Contents
List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments
page ix x xiv
Introduction: The New Modernist Studies
Douglas Mao
:
History’s Prehistory: Modernist Studies before the New Michael North
Scholarship’s Turn: Origins and Effects of the New Modernist Studies
Mark Wollaeger
:
Planetarity’s Edges: Modernist Studies and the Bounds of Modernism
María del Pilar Blanco
Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
Susan Stanford Friedman
Disability’s Disruptions: Embodiment and the New Modernist Studies Maren Linett
vii
Contents
viii
Affect’s Vocabularies: Literature and Feeling after
David James
Invisibility’s Arts: The Seen and the Unseen in Modernism and Modernist Studies
Sarah Cole
Black Writing’s Visuals: African American Modernism in Nugent, Ligon, and Rankine
Miriam Thaggert
Noir Film’s Soundtracks: Jazz, Black Transnationalism, and Postcolonial Genres of Criminality
Edwin Hill
Language’s Hopes: Global Modernism and the Science of Debabelization
Aarthi Vadde
Revolution’s Demands: Modernism, Socialist Realism, and the Manifesto
Steven S. Lee
Feminism’s Archives: Mina Loy, Anna Mendelssohn, and Taxonomy
Sara Crangle
Risk’s Instruments: Speculation, Futurity, and Modernist Finance
Gayle Rogers
Deep Time’s Hauntings: Modernism and Alternative Chronology
Paul K. Saint-Amour
Bibliography Index
Figures
. Seventh Congress Site, Yan’an, June . page . Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (), manuscript detail. . Anna Mendelssohn, “MAMA: womanifiasco numera una” (). . Anna Mendelssohn, “MAMA: womanifiasco numera una” (), manuscript detail. . O. G. S. Crawford at Stonehenge in . . “New Discoveries at Stonehenge Made from the Air: Photographs at , Feet Revealing a Lost Avenue.” . Aerial photograph of Badbury taken at : a.m. on April , , showing a Roman road crossing diagonally from top right. . RAF aerial photomosaic taken on July , , at Caistor St. Edmund, showing the street grid of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum. . Annotated schema of Venta Icenorum by R. E. M. Wheeler.
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Notes on Contributors
ı´ is Associate Professor in Spanish American Literature and Fellow in Spanish at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination () and editor of a number of volumes, including Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (), co-edited with Joanna Page, and The Spectralities Reader: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (), co-edited with Esther Peeren. She is completing a second monograph project entitled Modernist Laboratories: Science and the Poetics of Progress in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish America. is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. A specialist in literary modernism, she is the co-founder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar. She is the author of three books, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (forthcoming ), At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (), and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (), and has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Modern Fiction Studies, and ELH, and in edited collections. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. is Professor of Modernism & the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex. Her publications include Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (), Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (), and, with Peter Nicholls, On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (). She is completing a monograph, Mina Loy: Anatomy of a Sacrificial Satirist (Edinburgh), and is editing the poetry and prose of Anna Mendelssohn, whose archive she brought to Sussex Special Collections in . x
Notes on Contributors
xi
, Hilldale Professor of English and Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (), Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (), Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge, ), and Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (). She is also the editor of four scholarly collections and has published over eighty articles and book chapters. Her honors include the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies (), the Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies (), a Choice Academic Book Award (), the Florence Howe Award for Best Essay in Feminist Criticism (), and fellowships from ACLS, NEH, and the American Psychoanlytic Association. is Professor of French and Italian and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His first book, Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Sound in the Francophone Black Atlantic (), considers the torn aesthetic and ideological relationships between Antillean music and literature from the s to the s to be a colonial struggle over the meaning of Caribbean vernacular culture. His current book project, Black Static, locates rage as a sonic/affective vibration routed through the circuits of African diasporic musical culture, travel, and communication. He is also at work on a critical biography of Léon Gontran-Damas. is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, before which he was Reader in English at Queen Mary, University of London. His most recent books include Discrepant Solace () and Modernist Futures (), along with edited volumes such as The Legacies of Modernism () and Modernism and Close Reading (). For Columbia University Press, he co-edits the book series Literature Now. . is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Korean Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution () and co-editor (with Amelia M. Glaser) of Comintern Aesthetics ().
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Notes on Contributors
is Professor of English and director of the disability studies program at Purdue University. She is the author of Modernism, Feminism, and Jewishness () and Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature (), and the editor of Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader and The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Her next book, Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human is forthcoming from New York University Press. is Russ Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production () and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature – () as well as the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (). A past president of the Modernist Studies Association, he has held a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and currently serves as Series Editor of Hopkins Studies in Modernism. is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Novelty: A History of the New (); Machine-Age Comedy (); Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (); The Waste Land: A Norton Critical Edition (); Reading : A Return to the Scene of the Modern (); The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (); The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (); The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (); and Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation (). In addition to the books listed above, he has published articles on modern art, literature, and politics in numerous journals. He has also received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a UC President’s Research Fellowship, the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize (), the Robert Motherwell Book Award (), and the Norman Foerster Award for the best article to appear in American Literature (). In he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature () and Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (). With Sean Latham, he is co-author of Modernism: Evolution of an Idea () and co-editor of the New Modernisms series. His articles and translations have appeared in PMLA,
Notes on Contributors
xiii
Modernism/modernity, Comparative Literature, NOVEL, LARB, Public Books, and other publications. His current book project is Speculation: The Nature of Imagination, from Aristotle to AI. . - is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and chair of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination () and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (). Saint-Amour edits, with Jessica Berman, the Modernist Latitudes series at Columbia University Press. In he edited a special issue of Modernism/modernity on weak theory. is Associate Professor of English at SUNY–Buffalo, where she teaches African American literature. She is the author of Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (). Her other writings have appeared in African American Review, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Meridians, and Feminist Modernist Studies. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Newberry Library, and the Virginia Humanities. is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Her research focuses on the relationship of literature and technology to globalization. She is the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, – (), winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. She is also co-editor of The Critic as Amateur () and The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (forthcoming). She has published articles on global modernism, contemporary Anglophone literature, digital literary culture, and postcolonialism in such venues as Modernism/modernity, New Literary History, NOVEL, Post, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Public Books. , Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, works on modernism, media studies, British film, and modern fiction. His publications include Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from to () and Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism (). He is editor of two collections of essays on Joyce and the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (). Wollaeger has served as President of the Modernist Studies Association and cofounded the Modernist Literature & Culture book series.
Acknowledgments
The first debt of this volume is to Ray Ryan, who not only commissioned it but also brought brilliant counsel to its shaping. Profound thanks are due also to Edgar Mendez, Mathew Rohit, Sharon McCann, and Beth Morel, whose care for the book in production was a source of joy as well as comfort. For generosity in permissions, the other contributors and I are grateful to the Anna Mendelssohn estate, the Anna Mendelssohn Archive at the University of Sussex, the Mina Loy estate, and the OGS Crawford Photographic Archive. Let me also inscribe some notes of personal thanks. First, to Chip Wass, Evelyn Schwarz, and other beloved ones for insight and support beyond my deserving. Next, to the scholars of modernism – young and old, now and then – who have made and continue to make modernist studies so vibrant a project (anew each day; and new and new and new). Finally and above all, to my fellow contributors, whose creativity, erudition, responsiveness, and hard work made the fashioning of this volume a delight – and the volume itself, for me at least, a wonder.
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Introduction The New Modernist Studies Douglas Mao
Modernist and Other Studies The century that witnessed the heyday of modernism in the arts also saw two flowerings, at least, of modernist studies. The first began in the late s, as a number of critics and scholars sought to understand the nature, value, and fate of a range of innovations in art and literature of the preceding decades. The second, more centered in the academy and responsive to later-evolving currents in scholarship, emerged in the century’s very last years. This more recent development, and its vibrant, complicated continuation into our present, is the topic of this volume. The collection opens with two chapters offering fresh perspectives on the origins of the new modernist studies. The first of these situates the stirrings of the enterprise among key intellectual configurations of the end of the twentieth century; the second offers an institution-centered history based on recollections and assessments gathered from scholars and others associated with the evolution of the field over the past two decades. There follow twelve essays that attend to recent trends in modernist scholarship, not by way of summarizing the largest and most visible ones – a project that has been carried out elsewhere – but in an effort to illuminate threads, and gaps, that might portend new lines of inquiry. The New Modernist Studies is thus intended to serve as a volume of record for the field’s early years as well as a scene of speculation on a few of the directions (a very few out of innumerable possible ones) in which it might develop in the years to come. The new modernist studies did not come into being at one stroke, nor have its qualities and boundaries been rigidly defined. Like many “studies” fields, it began to coalesce before a name for it went into wide circulation, and it has developed unpredictably over its short life. Still, we can here point to a few temporal markers – more will be forthcoming in the contributions from Michael North and Mark Wollaeger – and to a
number of characteristics, successes, and tensions that have characterized it so far and will undoubtedly shape its future. As Wollaeger notes, the term “new modernist studies” first appeared no later than , the same year that the journal Modernism/modernity commenced publication. The first conference of the Modernist Studies Association, called “The New Modernisms,” was held in , and by , Rebecca L. Walkowitz and I could, in our introduction to Bad Modernisms, enumerate key features of “the new modernist studies” or “the new modernisms” with some confidence. As we suggested there and in a “Changing Profession” piece in PMLA, the new modernist studies has had, as “studies” fields go, an especially visible relationship to institutions. Its early trajectory was much tied up with Modernism/modernity and the MSA, and it is impossible to conceive of modernist studies today in separation from the journals, book series, and scholarly organizations that have, over the past twenty-five years, permitted scholars of modernism to come together and disseminate their work. No less crucial to the shape of the new modernist studies has been its origin in a pushback against certain negative views of modernist art and literature. To be sure, in the last years of the twentieth century, “modernism” did enjoy exceptional institutional priority in one respect: in English departments in the United States, at least, it was not uncommon to speak of the four most recent periods of Anglo-American literature as Romantic, Victorian/nineteenth-century, modernist, and postwar/postmodern/contemporary. At the same time, many literature scholars offhandedly dismissed modernist works, especially in architecture and literature, as monuments to desiccated authorial egotism, to unnecessary difficulty, to quietist withdrawal from the real world. As both North and Wollaeger note in their chapters, this kind of dismissal had much to do with the dominance of “postmodernism,” which positioned modernism as the joyless other it had gleefully supplanted, though in later years more and more scholars would come to think of postmodernism as an extension of modernism’s projects merely disguised as a repudiation. The new modernist studies was partly driven by a desire to counter this reflexive disparagement, which is to say that one of its distinguishing features is its rooting in an effort to rescue canonical works from a mistrust associated in some ways with their very canonicity. At least as integral to the new modernist studies, however, was an effort to stimulate exploration of authors and artists whose works seemed modernist in form, or in dialogue with canonical modernist texts, but who had not received the level of attention accorded more prominent figures. This
Introduction: The New Modernist Studies
meant, above all, following the lead of scholars who since the s had been working to counter the marginalization of women writers, writers of color, lesbian and gay writers, and writers working outside Europe and North America. It still comes as a shock to see Virginia Woolf’s name absent from Terry Eagleton’s list of “the seven most significant writers of twentieth-century English literature” in ’s Exiles and Emigrés; such an omission would have been far less likely twenty years later, but as North and Wollaeger point out, the new modernist studies took some of its bearings from, and eventually contributed to, the transformation of the canon that had started before it arrived on the scene. Scholars committed to revitalizing the study of modernism in the s were interested in more than reexamining canonical works and expanding the canon, however. They also wanted to study both new and old objects differently. Susan Stanford Friedman has suggested that what was most centrally new in the new modernist studies was its openness to methods and values associated with other studies’ approaches, and in his contribution to this volume, North shows how the characteristic procedures of the new modernist studies render it legible almost as an application or subdomain of cultural studies – one whose belated emergence had perhaps to wait for the decline of a postmodernism with which cultural studies was long and somewhat strangely entangled. Of course, in seeking new modes of analysis, scholars of the “new modernisms” aligned with scholars in the studies fields upon which they drew. Feminist scholars, scholars of race, postcolonial and queer theorists, and practitioners of cultural studies have never, in their engagements with literature, been devoted exclusively to the project of adding more women writers, writers of color, non-EuroAmerican writers, queer writers, or “popular” writers to the canon. Their effort has also been to change the interpretive and evaluative lenses through which texts are read. Similarly, the new modernist studies’ widening of its range of primary materials has been inextricable from an effort to enlarge the toolkit of methods and perspectives that can be brought to bear on those materials. In this respect, it would be a mistake to emphasize the expansion in “temporal, spatial, and vertical directions” that Walkowitz and I described in the PMLA essay at the expense of the recognition that the new modernist studies was as much a matter of fresh approaches as of larger range of objects studied. That the contributors to the present collection were not asked specifically what modernist studies might glean from other approaches makes it the more noteworthy that all of them indicate, sometimes obliquely but often directly, how the field has learned and must continue to learn from
studies areas and disciplines that have in no way “belonged” to it, nor ever can. This is especially evident in the contributions from Friedman and Maren Linett, who make clear that as scholars of modernism pursue questions of belief, theology, and secularity and of mobility, weakness, and the non-normate body, they have much to gain from drawing upon – and much to lose from failing to attend to – the insights of religious studies and disability studies. Edwin Hill and David James point to the scarcely tapped resources, for scholars of modernism, of sound studies and affect theory, while Paul Saint-Amour invites us to a productively disorienting reframing of modernist time in terms of ecomaterialist inquiry. Race studies and Black studies furnish crucial points of departure for Miriam Thaggert as well as Hill, and also in key ways for Gayle Rogers and Sarah Cole. Sara Crangle’s chapter adumbrates ways in which modernist studies will continue to be transformed by feminist and meta-archival approaches. Steven Lee’s contribution, meanwhile, illustrates how the global turn in modernist studies must engage with ethnic studies (including explorations of the historical construction of ethnicities), while María del Pilar Blanco draws on versions of global theory from a number of fields to assess modernist studies’ “planetary” turn. Contributors to this volume also illuminate how scholarship in other disciplines (or in “studies” areas that have become quasi-disciplinary by dint of institutional recognition) continues to furnish crucial paradigms and lenses. This is particularly true of Hill on film, Thaggert on the visual arts, Cole as well Aarthi Vadde on the history of science and technology, Rogers on the history of sociology and economics, and the comparative literary practice of Blanco, Friedman, Hill, Vadde, and Lee. While only some of this volume’s contributors reflect explicitly on cross-field interchange, then, they collectively emphasize how other fields may intersect at, as well as with, modernist studies, and how projects originating within modernist studies can contribute to other areas of inquiry. They make a case, that is, for the continuing productivity of modernist studies’ porousness. Two other features shared by this collection’s contributors may at first appear in tension with the one just named: that they hold appointments within literature departments and that their chapters nearly all focus on written works. These features arise from the volume’s publication context and my own view of what, given this context, such a book might try to do. The New Modernist Studies was commissioned for the Twenty-FirstCentury Critical Revisions series from Cambridge University Press, joining volumes such as The New Emily Dickinson Studies, The New Pynchon Studies, and The New Jewish American Literary Studies. The capacity of
Introduction: The New Modernist Studies
“studies” to fall anywhere on a spectrum from the fully performative (establishing what was not there) to the fully ostensive (pointing to what is already there) is nicely illustrated by the somewhat odd fit of The New Modernist Studies within this configuration: unlike these other volumes, it cannot remotely be understood as helping to call its subject into being. With this intersection between the character of the Cambridge series and the history of “the new modernist studies” in mind, I chose to solicit views from scholars who have in recent years worked a little or a great deal within the field – which does remain literature-centric in spite of the early aspirations to interdisciplinarity that Wollaeger details in his chapter. The present volume does not, then, aim to reconceive the new modernist studies from a point of view external to it – though such a project would be enormously valuable – but rather to draw on the experience and imagination of scholars familiar with its trajectory in recent years. This should by no means be taken to imply that the long-range future of modernist studies will or should be one in which scholars working principally outside literature play little part. Indeed, it would seem that most scholars working in modernist studies today believe that the field’s original pursuit of interdisciplinarity should be reclaimed.
Modernist Studies Studies As the question of interdisciplinarity’s fate suggests, the interchange between the new modernist studies and the other fields just described furnishes a backdrop against which to examine the achievements and disappointments of the former over the past two-plus decades. For some, the new modernist studies has been characterized by continuous and generative transformation, by an admirable restlessness that has made it a model of productive interchange across scholarly boundaries. Proponents of this view might hold up in evidence developments such as the “global” turn, an expansion of attention to women writers and writers of color, increasingly sophisticated and frank appraisals of the politico-economic matrices in which modernism and its readers have operated, an evergrowing body of work on intermedial interfaces, and a promising if nascent engagement with digital platforms and large-data research methods. For others, by contrast, the “new” in the new modernist studies must to varying degrees read as ironic or inapt. Lamenting the field’s failure to learn sufficiently from other fields and disciplines, let alone to metabolize their methodologies and values, holders of this position might observe that the gravitational center of the new modernist studies remains in the global
North, that its culturalist slant has hardly wavered since the turn of the century, that it has if anything grown more literature-dominated than it was at its inception, that its canon of authors remains disproportionately white and male, that it has been slow to consider how some of its key assumptions are challenged by new perspectives on race and indigeneity, and that it remains less politically engaged than some of its close compeers. For still others, the new modernist studies has been all too flexible. Noting, for example, how imperatives from other studies areas have contributed to the tendency to expand the reach of the term “modernism,” the exponent of this perspective might urge that the new modernist studies has never been as intellectually coherent as it ought to be, or that it has been diminishingly so, and that it courts losing whatever specificity of aim it once had because its objects of analysis are essentially unlimited. Debate on this last question – that of how far the term “modernism” can usefully be extended – has of course been front and center in the new modernist studies’ already considerable body of self-scrutiny, which has accrued in books, journal issues, online discussions, and face-to-face forums. So ubiquitous has been this question that the skeptic might, adapting Thom Gunn’s two-line poem “Jamesian,” propose “Their scholarship consisted / in deciding if its object existed” as modernist studies’ motto. Yet for many, contention over the parameters of “modernism” has been necessary and indeed fruitful, less a drain on attention that might better be directed elsewhere than a useful goad to assessing the field’s values, politics, promise, and blind spots. Even where scholars doubt the value of trying to settle the question once and for all, they often remark how beneficial has been the unsettledness of scope associated with the field’s central term. In Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (), Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers argue that “modernist studies has been strengthened by the lack of resolution over what exactly modernism is.” In “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism” (), Paul Saint-Amour argues “that modernist studies’s emergence as a field has been concomitant with a steady weakening of its key term, modernism. Ours has become a strong field – populous, varied, generative, self-transforming – in proportion as it has relaxed its definitions of modernism and learned to ask other questions of a work, than ‘But is it really modernist?’” One thing on which scholars mostly agree is that the reach of the term “modernism” has never been securely fixed. If in the middle years of the twentieth century “modernism” came into its own (among Englishlanguage-centric intellectuals) as an umbrella term for an array of related movements of earlier decades, still, as Latham and Rogers observe, the
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“sharp rise in the use of the word ‘modernism’ and its kin (modern, modernisme, modernismo, Modernismus) in the later nineteenth century” suggests that even by this time, “writers, artists, and thinkers around the world believed that something was happening, that the established conventions of realism, representation, and poetic form seemed to be failing in the face of new experiences, new audiences, and new things.” In recent years, contestation over the application of “modernism” has been fueled by efforts to bring into consideration works of earlier and later date as well as artifacts, including works of popular culture, whose formal characteristics would not have made them “modernist” according to mid-century standards. But the most energetic debates about the reach of the term have been associated with the turn to “global modernisms.” Toward the end of the twentieth century, scholars from several disciplines initiated a powerful reconsideration of the assumption that modernity is principally a property of the West. And this quickly led to the question of whether alternative modernities imply alternative modernisms. In a essay, Friedman, citing multiple-modernities work by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and others, asked provocatively whether the Tang Dynasty in China, Timbuktu at the height of its influence, and Mughal India must not be considered among the “times and places of modernity” if modernity is a condition of “accelerated societal change” wherein “new technologies, knowledge revolutions, state formations, and expanding intercultural contacts contribute to radical questioning and dismantling of traditional ontologies, epistemologies, and institutional structures.” In their collection Geomodernisms, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel sought a “break[ing] open” of the term “modernism” into a “geomodernisms, which signals a locational approach to modernity.” By , Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker could propose, in their continent-traversing Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, a view of modernism “as an overdetermined, overlapping, and multiply networked range of practices . . . always caught up in a dialectical process of affirmation and negation.” In ’s Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Wollaeger would advocate understanding “modernism” in the manner of “Wittgenstein’s family resemblance, a polythetic form of classification in which the aim is to specify a set of criteria, subsets of which are enough to constitute a sense of decentered resemblance.” Friedman would then offer the most extensive elaboration of her argument for “planetary modernisms” in her book of that name; the following year, Walkowitz and Eric Hayot would, in A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, offer the hope that in time “global modernism” will fall out of
use – the term being replaced just by “modernism,” under a general understanding that “the global [was] there from the beginning.” In “Weak Theory,” Saint-Amour particularly highlights modernist studies’ spatial “expansion” in pointing to concerns about modernist studies’ expansionism – about how to balance “the obligation to broaden narrow canons” with “the dangers of overreach and appropriation.” As these examples may suggest, the extension of what “modernism” can designate has raised at least three entangled questions. One is whether “modernism” ceases to have analytical purchase if anything can potentially be modernist; a second is whether in enlarging the reach of its central term, modernist studies has operated imperialistically and appropriatively; a third is whether the widening of the scope of “modernism” is really a repackaging of an honorific term as a descriptive one. These questions remain vitally unresolved, and this introduction is not the place to try to settle them. But I would like to contribute a very small data point that may say something about the status of “modernism” and “modernist” at this moment. On a recent syllabus for a thematically oriented graduate course on modernism, I included Mike Gold’s novel Jews without Money and Jean Renoir’s film Toni – two works that, from the standpoint of “modernism” as once understood, would look like very curious choices. Gold was a vigorous opponent of what we would call modernist tendencies in writing; Toni is regularly cited as one of the key inspirations for Italian neorealism and as an early and particularly pure instantiation of a certain anti-modernism that André Bazin and others would champion in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma. These well-known features of Gold’s and Renoir’s texts notwithstanding, it occurred to me only as I was teaching Jews without Money that there was something ironic about putting it on a syllabus whose other entries Gold might largely have disdained, and only as I was teaching Toni that it might seem odd to include in a modernism course a work exhibiting so many anti-modernist features. What does this delay in recognition tell us? Certainly, one might claim that Jews without Money contains a suite of formal innovations that make it modernist against itself, or that Toni demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain a distinction between modernist and non-modernist innovation when the art in question is cinema. Or one might maintain that both texts are, for various reasons, essentially anti-modernist after all. What seems impossible to imagine, however, is a future in which Gold’s novel or Renoir’s film would be excluded from modernist studies research and syllabi. In writing about and teaching such texts, we should undoubtedly register where and how they were pitched
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against investments associated with modernism at certain times, but to eliminate them from consideration by the field would be pointlessly impoverishing. As Michaela Bronstein has noted, modernist studies cannot limit itself to works that are evidently or possibly modernist: “we can consider ourselves responsible to a broader history without declaring ourselves responsible for it. Modernist studies . . . must be a broader field than the particular works it labels as its objects of study – however various and diverse those may become.” The essays in the second part of this volume attest to the continuing generativity of studying interchanges between modernist works, on the one hand, and phenomena that can be construed as non-, anti-, or not quite modernist, on the other. Linett, for example, tests the boundaries of the canon in reading one of modernism’s most famous monuments together with less-discussed texts by a writer increasingly central to modernist studies. Thaggert begins with a short story that has so far received relatively little attention from scholars but seems poised, for many reasons, to attract a great deal more. In taking up texts and paratexts associated with social(ist) realism, James and Lee participate in a recent turn away from the assumption that realism is modernism’s defining other and toward the view that the modernism-realism binary is more a useful heuristic than a hard fact. On the other side of what we might call the reality-effect spectrum, Cole opens with a novel, and Rogers closes with one, that might not be modernist because science fiction or might be more modernist because science fiction. Hill, meanwhile, examines confluences of noir film and jazz, two forms once set in opposition to high art that, though long since read through high-art protocols, remain provocative of valuable questions about where the boundaries of modernism lie. If Cole, Hill, and Rogers evoke modernist studies’ illumination of the permeability of the high-low boundary – the “vertical” dimension of culture – other contributors point to the rethinking of modernism’s horizons that has occurred along temporal and spatial axes. Thaggert and Crangle, as well as James briefly, read in texts published well after the early twentieth century that deploy modernist formal strategies while also engaging modernism’s associations with patriarchy, white privilege, and putatively self-indulgent introspection; Cole’s own analysis moves back and forth between novels published in and . Blanco, Friedman, and Vadde, meanwhile, take up literary texts whose non-European origins might once have put them outside the modernist ambit but now call forth the kinds of questions about modernism’s global reach that we remarked above. Moreover, Vadde presses in an additional way on the question of
what modernist studies can encompass, inasmuch as she reads extensively in texts – in this case, early and mid-twentieth-century debates on international auxiliary languages (IALs) – that are very difficult to construe as literary. In this, she joins several other contributors to the volume, most notably Lee, who examines official and quasi-official public proclamations, and Saint-Amour, who weaves passages from Virginia Woolf together with reports in aerial archaeology. To encounter Vadde, Lee, and Saint-Amour on these documents is to feel, at least for a moment, the impossibility of asserting definitely that these non-literary texts are not “modernist.” It is to appreciate especially keenly the fuzziness of the line between modernist contexts and modernism.
Modernism contra Studies The question of context deserves a bit more reflection at this moment in the life of modernist studies and of literary study as a whole. The description of the MSA that appears on its homepage, which as Wollaeger notes in his chapter has carried over from the founding of the organization, begins as follows: “The Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the later nineteenth- through the mid-twentieth century.” Much might be said about the temporal boundaries named here, which as already noted have lost a good deal of their force over the past two decades, and much too about the non-literary arts, which again have not received as much attention as might have been predicted at the MSA’s inception. On the other hand, “contexts,” unquestionably the pivotal noun in the description, seems to capture very well what many contributing to the new modernist studies felt they were taking on in the early years and what many concern themselves with today. At least from our present vantage, it is hard to see what would be left of modernist studies if the study of contexts were suddenly proscribed. In other quarters of literary study, however, context has been thrown some notable metacritical shade. In his widely read Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (), Joseph North argues that since the s, scholarship has been dominated by an assumption “that, for academic purposes, works of literature are chiefly of interest as diagnostic instruments for determining the state of the cultures in which they were written or read”; he proposes that a radical left agenda may be truly served only by a return of genuine criticism that would displace this “‘historicist/ contextualist’ paradigm.” For the title of her final chapter in the no less
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discussed Limits of Critique (), Rita Felski borrows a phrase of Bruno Latour’s, “Context Stinks!,” to argue that literary works must be read in ways that do not entomb them in reified historical periods and that remain alert to their capacity to make things happen. The manifesto of the V Collective, meanwhile, laments Victorian studies’ having fallen prey to “to positivist historicism” and recommends a reconsideration of the virtues of presentism. But what is the more specific animus against context in these polemics? The commentators do not suggest that scholars should avoid writing about context at all, which position would be very difficult to maintain. The principal objection seems rather to be to a privileging of context at the expense of exploring how the work – or, more rigorously speaking, contemporary readers’ responses to the work – might influence the life of the present. Felski stresses, again, that “[h]istory is not a box,” that “standard ways of thinking about historical context are unable to explain how works of art move across time,” that we need to contest “the sacrosanct status of period boundaries,” and that “[l]iterary texts can be usefully thought of as nonhuman actors” whose “ability to make a difference . . . derives not from [their] refusal of the world but from [their] many ties to the world.” North meanwhile argues that historicist/contextualist work, aligning with neoliberal imperatives favoring politically nonthreatening forms of expertise, crucially abandons “‘critical’ approaches, which, in their day, had tended to treat literary texts as means of cultivating readers’ aesthetic sensibilities, ‘aesthetic’ here of course being understood in a range of rather different senses.” In its turn to cultural analysis, he argues, “the discipline agreed to transform itself into a discipline of observation, tracking developments in the culture without any broader mandate to intervene in it.” Like the V Collective, in sum, both Felski and North urge a bringing to the fore of the ongoing power of texts, and of reactions to them, to affect the contemporary world – a feature of literature that (the dominance of ) contextual analysis has allegedly suppressed. Against these summary dismissals, it may be objected that few scholars whose research is broadly contextualist or historicist practice a pedagogy under which students, or readers, are asked to appreciate the total irrelevance of the texts before them to their own lives. It may be remarked as well that insofar as a distance between the past of the text and the presentday audience is emphasized, this is usually in the name of pressing the latter to see that their own assumptions are by no means transhistorically affirmed – thus indeed changing their relationship to the world they inhabit. Even were we to accept the dubious premise that elucidations of
context come at the expense of texts’ capacity to speak to the present, however, there are particular problems for this view in the orbit of modernist studies. Notwithstanding that Felski and North are scholars of modernism, one might conclude that their polemics are of less moment for modernist studies than for some other fields because so many of the “contexts” of modernism clearly persist in our own time. If modernist scholars do not always foreground their focal texts’ power to make us reexamine the world we live in and speculate on its future, this may be in part because the implications of their work for the here and now are fairly evident. (Proliferating courses on fascism and modernism, at the time of this writing, underscore this point all too grimly.) What this means is that modernist scholars, especially, might approach goals like Felski’s and North’s not by eschewing context in favor of transhistorical volubility or in situ evaluative criticism but by helping students and readers to discern meanings for our own moment in both texts and their contexts. Of course, this “and” points not only to how texts operate in apparent concert with their milieux – expounding period ideologies, mirroring social structures, mimetically representing the sites and conditions in which they emerged – but also to how they can, in one sense or another, run against their contexts’ grain. This point, which Felski and North would surely embrace, is also one that Christopher Bush articulates in a recent consideration of “context” within the vocabulary of global modernism: [C]laiming that a text is a perfect expression of “its context” is but another way of saying one is incapable of learning anything from it. Ironically, such restorations regularly contradict what we can know about authorial intent. To the extent we understand “modernism” as precisely a form of literature that does not seek to reflect its “context” in any immediate way, we are often going against authorial intent when we prioritize the local and immediate whereas, strangely enough, the very refusal of proximate context determinacy can be understood as a kind of fidelity, even a kind of historicism.
One point Bush’s comment brings out is that we do sacrifice something important – and indeed make a basic error of fact – if we imply that a text is in some way a pure expression of whatever context we delineate. Whether texts are, ontologically, the expressions of all their determining contexts might be debated until the end of time, but in the sphere of practice, the question is moot because it is impossible to describe or even enumerate all the contexts of a given text. Whatever particular context is limned in a particular discussion, the text will in some sense exceed it, and this whether the text is “modernist” or not.
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But Bush’s comment also recalls that modernist texts may seem to run counter to their contexts in especially aggressive or explicit ways. And in considering the origins and futures of the new modernist studies, we may do well to recall that one way some modernist authors and artists pushed against their contexts lay in a vigorous anti-academicism. The works of art that first came to be gathered under the sign of “modernism” were produced mainly in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, when the academic disciplines that take art and literature as their foci were congealing into the forms they take today. Perhaps not surprisingly, modernist works’ creators were often hostile to the institutions that housed or otherwise supported those disciplines. The antipathetic position instantiated by modernizing French painters’ protests against the rigidity of the Académie des Beaux-Arts across the nineteenth century effloresces in a dizzying array of other forms as well, from the perturbations of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé to the manifestos of the Italian Futurists and the Russian Hylaeans, from Ezra Pound’s diatribes against the thickheadedness of educators and publishers to Virginia Woolf’s dissection of university patriarchies, from the pointed antics of the Anti-Academia Nicaragu¨ense to the similarly critical eye cast on the academy as synecdoche of the imperial metropole by Aimé Césaire, Jean Amrouche, and scores of others. Without anti-academicism, modernism would have been impossible. Yet if modernism cannot be conceived absent its anti-academic propulsions, it is equally impossible to imagine it absent its uptake, indeed its elaboration, by scholars, critics, teachers, curators, and others associated with academic institutions. (The Salon de Refusés of was, we might recall, created at the behest of Napoléon III and held in the same Palais de l’Industrie that housed the works admitted to the Paris Salon.) One of the achievements of modernist studies in the past two decades has been to demonstrate how modernism was shaped not only by a complex relationship to disavowed commodification but also by a formally similar intercourse with legitimating institutions, from publishing houses to literature departments, from museums to research centers. No serious scholar of modernism can deny that part of its story is that of an institutionally shepherded shift from, in Simon Gikandi’s words, “transgressive, epiphanic event” to “centerpiece of Western high culture,” though there may be much disagreement on which elements in that shift matter most. Modernism cannot truthfully be characterized as a purely anti-institutional phenomenon, in other words, so that when contemporary scholars highlight the gap between modernist artists’ antipathy to convention and
modernism’s eventual institutionalization, they may be solidifying their own complacency as easily as challenging it. Yet to keep the anti-academic dimension of modernism in view seems important as a matter of historical accuracy – and would surely align with the turn to scholarly modesty urged by Felski, Saint-Amour (who cites Felski in “Weak Theory”), and others advocating similar stances. There is another tension between the manner and the objects of our scholarly inquiry that merits some attention. That the focus of new modernist studies research has been on works of art may seem too obvious to require mentioning, yet the point surfaces less frequently than one might think in debates about the future of the field. Even though modernist studies is now attuned to many other cultural phenomena and eyes with suspicion the once formidable divisions between high and low, it is clear that there would be no modernism as we understand it today without works of art; indeed part of the rationale for modernist studies quietly remains that certain kinds of objects are particularly worthy of interest, and this in part because they produce meaning in particularly intricate ways. At the same time, published work in the field tends, for a very straightforward reason, to prioritize elaborations of context over elucidations of texts’ internal workings. If a piece of scholarship is to be highly valued according to current standards, it must ordinarily put forward some argument with wide theoretical, historical, or other implications; the reader of a scholarly book or article will, quite reasonably, object to observations about how a text accomplishes this or that feat of meaning-making (by enjambment or repetition, by zeugma or counterfactuals) if the meaning produced has no relevance to the book’s or the article’s larger argument. Background or contextual matter is, in this key sense, more informationally crucial than examination of the devices operating within a given text. Some version of context – and this would of course include the relevance to contemporary readers championed by Felski and (Joseph) North, as well as the interdisciplinary engagements characteristic of the new modernist studies – is thus privileged over the internal operations of the primary work not because scholars want to flaunt their mastery over a text rendered abject but because elucidation of this or that particular intricacy may not be relevant to the larger discovery being presented or the theme of the seminar being taught. The prioritization is understandable, but its consequence for works-of-art-centered fields such as modernist studies is that they can seem to drift toward doing only half their job, or losing part of their raison d’être. The micro-analyses that gain their special value by dint
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of the specialness of the field’s primary objects will not always cluster in a way that permits them to form the backbone of a larger project. The twelve essays in the second part of this volume all undertake explorations that may be described as contextual but that also incorporate significant analyses of how textual details generate meaning. This is perhaps most evident in the chapter from James, one of whose primary concerns in reading Woolf, Storm Jameson, and others is with moments when style’s own feeling about itself, so to speak, stands in tension with affects associated with what is being represented diegetically. This feature is also strongly visible, however, in Thaggert’s probing of how visual artists and writers (Richard Bruce Nugent, Glenn Ligon, Claudia Rankine) address the constraints and affordances of each other’s media, and in Hill’s elucidation of how convergences of filmic images, soundtracks, records, radio, and television around Miles Davis, Martial Solal, Louis Malle, and Jean-Pierre Melville broke new social as well as intermedial ground. Lee parses ghosts of the manifesto and other sources of rhetorical authority in Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks; central to Crangle’s analysis of published and unpublished works by Mina Loy and Anna Mendelssohn is how these writers play with language in ways that evoke but also exceed prior adventures in Dada and the manifesto form. Other contributors too examine the serious consequences of textual play, Blanco delving into onomastic games in Rubén Darío, Saint-Amour into temporal and syntactical jumbles in Woolf, Vadde into absurd catalogs in G. V. Desani and neologisms in Aimé Césaire. Still other contributors consider how particular figures or images reverberate across multiple texts. Cole, for example, shows how invisibility in H. G. Wells, Ralph Ellison, and others speaks to fantasies of power and withdrawal that were especially resonant in the twentieth century, while for Friedman, significations of the veil highlight resonances between H.D. and Huda Shaarawi (which in turn shed light on questions of religious identity in E. M. Forster and Rabindranath Tagore). For Rogers, George Schuyler’s Black No More achieves its effect by way of an exceptionally tight assembling of details around the motif of financial risk, while for Linett, Joseph Conrad and Elizabeth Bowen raise a host of profitably thorny questions in conjoining powerful personalities with scarcely mobile bodies. It may be that modernist studies going forward would benefit from a greater willingness among journal editors, book publishers, and conference organizers to embrace work more weighted to elucidation of how textual elements conspire to produce meaning – toward, in other words, the art of close reading, which sometimes looks in danger of being lost. Whether or
not such a recalibration would be viable, however, the synthesis of contextual and textual analysis in evidence in this volume’s later chapters is something modernist studies will surely want to continue to sponsor, lest it find itself devoted to exposition of the contexts of things whose reason for receiving extensive attention becomes harder and harder to discern. This question of the value of the whole field is not merely a philosophical one. A different version of it presses in a much more material register. As many younger scholars have pointed out, the greatest threat to modernist studies, so long the beneficiary of the support of institutions, is that going forward it may receive from colleges and universities less and less of the form of support it most foundationally requires: full-time faculty positions. When “modernism” stood in, curricularly, for whatever emerged in literature or art between the end of the nineteenth century and the end of World War II, a certain number of such appointments seemed a matter of course (as did many other kinds of faculty lines in literature departments). Now, younger scholars of modernism compete for positions covering broader temporal spans, as for example twentieth-century literature, even as such positions themselves diminish thanks to a general decline in humanities funding and to the appeal of appointments grounded in other demarcations of expertise (history of the lyric, say, or literature and medicine). The situation is doubtless not helped by a residual political and aesthetic mistrust of modernism that modernist studies has only partly succeeded in countering. If modernist studies is to have a robust future, then, it will need to do all it can to sustain this key institutional anchor. Clearly, one project worth continuing in this vein will be that of public outreach (which would have its intra-academic component): the task of making generally apparent the value of modernist art and literature, and scholarship on it, is again very far from accomplished. An irony on this front, of course, is that such publicfacing work may itself be construed as pointing toward a future deprofessionalization whose gains would be balanced by significant losses. It is certainly possible to imagine an immense gravitational shift, in the long term, under which work published largely in non-academic venues, not primarily directed at academics, and produced by scholars not credentialed in the ways we are used to now would become the undeniable center of a new – a far more radically new – modernist studies. Such a development might well comport with the anti-academicism of modernism itself described above, might be understood as a welcome return to the oppositionality modernism cultivated. And it could free scholars to pursue forms of inquiry not usually rewarded by academic promotion. But it
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would come at the expense of the research resources and depth of training provided by institutions of higher education, as well as the public value conferred by institutional inclusion. It would come at the expense, too, of the more or less immersive classroom pedagogy that helps students gain a deep rather than superficial understanding of modernist writing and art. And it would likely mean that it would be much more difficult even than it is now – and it is extremely difficult for younger scholars now – to build a life in which the study of modernism is one’s central occupation, not just an after-hours sideline. Whether the new modernist studies would still be the new modernist studies absent a robust cadre of practitioners holding (relatively) nonprecarious and (relatively) non-exploitative academic positions sounds like, and is, an academic question in more senses than one. It may be thought, too, that a consideration of hiring prospects is out of place in an introduction to a volume concerned with directions of intellectual inquiry in a scholarly domain. As already indicated, however, this volume joins others in recognizing how vitally modernist studies has been shaped by institutional substrates. And if we alter, just slightly, our angle of view on the question of the future of the field, we confront not a metaphysical conundrum about intellectual essence but the profoundly practical problem of how a field can survive absent people who can afford to devote to it the main part of their working time. For the new modernist studies going forward, this must surely count as the question of questions, the context of contexts.
Notes The most expansive version of this undertaking has come in the form of Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers (London: Bloomsbury, ) and the New Modernisms series for which that volume serves as an introduction. To date, New Modernisms has published the separately authored volumes Modernism in a Global Context (Peter Kalliney, ); Modernism’s Print Cultures (Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey, ); Modernism, Science, and Technology (Mark S. Morrisson, ); Modernism, War, and Violence (Marina MacKay, ); Modernism and the Law (Robert Spoo, ); Modernism, Sex, and Gender (Celia Marshik and Allison Pease, ); Race and the New Modernisms (K. Merinda Simmons and James A. Crank, ); and Modernism and Its Environments (Michael Rubenstein and Justin Neuman, ). Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “Introduction: Modernisms Bad and New,” in Bad Modernisms, ed. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .
Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA . (), –. Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (New York: Schocken, ), . In her afterword to the irreplaceable collection Disciplining Modernism, edited by Pamela Caughie, Friedman recalls that an “uprising of the interdisciplines – women’s studies, race studies, popular culture studies, gay/ lesbian/queer studies, postcolonial studies – into the heart of modernist studies in the s and s divided the field . . .. The new modernist studies . . . was born of this split and embodied the problems as well the potential of all rebellions that institutionalize.” Susan Stanford Friedman, afterword to Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela Caughie (Houndmills: Palgrave, ), . In Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, Latham and Rogers note similarly that changes in the significations of “modernism” from the s through the s “coincided with the revolutions in the professional study of literature that spawned departments and programs in women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies” () and track in detail how, by the turn of the twenty-first century, modernist studies had been shaped by new priorities coming from feminist and Marxist critics as well as scholars bringing to bear new conceptualizations of race, theory, the avant-garde, and postmodernism. Mao and Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” . Several contributors to Disciplining Modernism note how interdisciplinarity brings with it problems as well as possibilities; many of these problems remain with us a decade later. As Caughie remarks in the volume’s introduction, for example, the “ascendance of interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies, ethnic studies and cultural studies, and new theoretical perspectives such as postcolonial theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, . . . has brought about a reconsideration of those quintessentially mutable concepts, modernism and modernity,” yet “definitions of the key terms . . . differ markedly from one discipline to another, and even within disciplines” (). Caughie goes on to observe that some see a tension between “the kind of comparative and crossdisciplinary scholarship the new modernist studies promotes” and “the issues of aesthetics once central to literary studies” (–). “Jamesian” appears in Gunn’s The Man with Night Sweats (London: Faber, ). Latham and Rogers, Modernism, . Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory/Weak Modernism,” in “Weak Theory,” special issue, Modernism/modernity . (), . The Print Plus platform of Modernism/modernity published several rounds of thoughtful responses to the “Weak Theory” forum, many of which questioned one or more of the claims for the positive value of weakness put forward by Saint-Amour. “Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus, February , – August , . On this inaugural phase of a robust modernist studies (as we might call it, recognizing that “modernist studies” was not a phrase used by those
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contributing to it), see, to take just three examples, Fredric Jameson on the Cold War construction of a modernist ideology in A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, ), –; Michael North on making it new and aesthetic modernism in Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –; and Greg Barnhisel in Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Latham and Rogers, Modernism, . Among the most widely influential contributions to this revision was a number of Public Culture (.) on “alternative modernities” edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. This was then released as a volume from Duke University Press in : see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/modernity . (), . Reprinted in Disciplining Modernism, . Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, “Introduction: The Global Horizons of Modernism” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), . Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Mark Wollaeger, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, introduction to A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory,” –. Stephen Ross highlights this last question in a engagement with Friedman that takes up the other two questions as well. “No matter how you slice or redefine it,” in Ross’s view, “modernism remains an evaluative term . . .. From the perspective of those who came to modernism initially because we fell in love with it, . . . the term carries with it first and foremost the whiff of the excellent, the elite, as well as the well-loved.” Stephen Ross, “Uncanny Modernism, or Analysis Interminable,” in Disciplining Modernism, . Already in , in an influential piece taking stock of the new vibrancy in modernist studies, Jennifer Wicke had acknowledged that “[m]odernism is a brand name” – but also argued that this is no indictment, since a “brand name is not prima facie a shill, a facade covering an empty sameness . . .. Brand names carve out a locus for social recognition or attention” and “are exquisitely sensitive diacritical registers.” We must, Wicke goes on to argue, see that without passionate “[a]ppreciation (read: valuing),” we “cannot make the
necessary rebranding of modernism anything more than an exercise” – that “enthusiastic appreciations of modernism can be (should be) rigorous, historical, aesthetically incisive, and politically aware all at once,” but must be part of our activity as modernist scholars. Jennifer Wicke, “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble,” Modernism/modernity . (), , –. At the offices of The Liberator, Gold famously clashed with his fellow editors over questions of artistic value, they charging him “with being boorish and doctrinaire,” in Adam McKible’s words, he “characterizing them – particularly [Claude] McKay – as effete aesthetes who valued art over the needs of the proletariat.” Adam McKible, “‘Life is real and life is earnest’: Mike Gold, Claude McKay, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,” American Periodicals . (), . In a well-known broadside against Gertrude Stein that evokes other anti-modernist Marxist critics such as Gyorgy Lukács, Gold assailed the “extreme subjectivism of the contemporary bourgeois artist” and suggested that artists we would call modernist were members of “the leisure class” bored by “[n]ormal ways of using words” who “destroyed the common use of language . . . twisted grammar, syntax . . . went in for primitive emotions, primitive art.” Michael Gold, Change the World! (New York: International Publishers, ), , . Against montage and high theatricalism, Renoir developed a felt naturalness in Toni using on-location sound, long takes, depth staging, a cast composed largely of nonprofessionals, and an antimelodramatic performance style held in tension with a melodramatic plot. See on this point Miriam Bratu Hansen’s celebrated essay “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/modernity . (), –. Reprinted in Disciplining Modernism, . Michaela Bronstein, Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), :. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . V Collective, “Manifesto of the V Collective,” V Collective website, accessed April , . http://vcollective.org/manifesto-of-the-v-collec tive-ten-theses/.http://vcollective.org/manifesto-of-the-v-collective-tentheses/ Felski, Limits of Critique, . North, Literary Criticism, . North, Literary Criticism, –. Christopher Bush, “Context,” in A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, ed. Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Simon Gikandi, “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism,” in Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms, .
Introduction: The New Modernist Studies
In a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jonathan Kramnick compared numbers of advertisements for faculty positions in the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List for – with numbers in the same for –. He observed not only a sharp drop in the number of positions advertised by English departments overall but also a particularly alarming decrease in the modernist field: tenure-track “positions in modernism/th-century literature have dropped from ( percent of the total) to (. percent).” “What We Hire in Now: English by the Grim Numbers,” Chronicle of Higher Education online (December , ), https:// www-chronicle-com.proxy.library.jhu.edu/article/What-We-Hire-in-NowEnglish/.
Histories
History’s Prehistory Modernist Studies before the New Michael North
I When Alex Zwerdling published Virginia Woolf and the Real World in , the title was meant to be mildly polemical. It was supposed to deliver a salutary shock to readers used to thinking of Woolf and the real world as mutually exclusive. As Zwerdling put it, “It has taken us a long time to dissociate Woolf from Tennyson’s portrait of the artist isolated from her kind.” In previous Woolf scholarship, therefore, Woolf’s interest in “realism, history, and the social matrix” had been “largely ignored.” Of course, what is now shocking, at this point in the twenty-first century, is the idea that anyone could have ignored Woolf’s commitment to the real world, however that very ambitious term might be defined. Contemporary scholarship on Woolf is virtually dominated by studies of her relation to sexuality, politics, science, technology, popular culture, and the media. Some of this was under way even in , and Zwerdling’s generalization about previous work on Woolf seems to give pretty short shrift to the feminist scholarship of the period. Still, Zwerdling’s title had a certain timeliness in , a year in which a general turn toward the real world was widely perceptible in American literary scholarship. This shift in scholarly momentum was the subject of J. Hillis Miller’s Modern Language Association Convention (MLA) Presidential Address of that year. Trying not to sound too alarmed, Miller noted a “sudden, almost universal turn away from theory” and a “corresponding turn toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base in the sense of institutionalization, conditions of production, technology, distribution, and consumption of ‘cultural products,’ and other products.” Miller’s address amounted to an official announcement of a trend that was obvious to anyone in the profession at this time. Theory, widely perceived as unconcerned with the social context of literature, had lost its preeminence to cultural studies.
Zwerdling’s book, then, was part of a general development in literary scholarship that was already acknowledged as dominant within the profession. It is also clear, though, from the way Zwerdling presents his book, that modernist scholars were not at the forefront of this development. Expecting his readers to be a little surprised at the concatenation of Virginia Woolf and the real world at a time when studies of the real world had been officially acknowledged as the leading trend within the MLA, Zwerdling shows that modernist cultural studies was a rather late variant of cultural studies in general. Thus the question provoked by the title of Zwerdling’s book: What had kept the real world out for so long? Why had studies of modernism shown such a prolonged resistance to considerations of “realism, history, and the social matrix”? Of course, these are also questions that might be asked of the new modernist studies, which announced its commitment to a wider cultural studies a good two decades after Zwerdling’s book. To answer these questions, it might help to take a look at modernist scholarship prior to the new modernist studies, to see when and how the distance between modernism and the real world began to shrink.
II One of the most powerful factors conditioning the study of modernism from the beginning has been the traditional association of modernity itself with aesthetic autonomy. According to most accounts, art enters into its modern maturity when it frees itself from religious devotion and aristocratic patronage and becomes an independent activity, pursued for its own sake. For the Enlightenment, there is a natural association between the independent status of art and the free individual. According to common understanding of these ideas, as laid out in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, “the aesthetic sphere would thus be that of concrete, autonomous subjectivity: in artistic creation and in judgments of taste, the individual acts freely, without being subject to any heteronymy, whether theological, conceptual, or ethical.” Free expressions of taste and unconstrained artistic creation would thus be specific instances of the general independence of the modern individual, emancipated from “alien guidance,” as Kant projects it in “What Is Enlightenment?” What could, at some points to some individuals, seem like independence from religious or political domination soon looked to others like subjection to the market, and so the Romantic Idealists who followed and generally opposed Kant retained the idea of aesthetic autonomy but
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reversed its relation to modernity, so that art became a kind of antidote to modern conditions. In a time of increased book publication, driven by an essentially anonymous readership with indeterminate tastes, writers like the Schlegels reconstituted their own literary efforts as Art: independent, self-justifying, self-contained. In more general terms, art becomes the allpurpose alternative to modernity at large, unified where modernity is dispersed, organic where it is mechanical, self-justified where it is uncertain. Passed on by way of the British Romantics to Matthew Arnold, this becomes the settled dogma of late Victorianism: poetry as spiritual refuge in a time of rampant materialism. The autonomy of art was still an effect of modernity but now in an entirely negative sense, as an inversion of the practical, instrumental, mechanical nature of the real world. This is the Tennysonian doctrine from which Zwerdling finds it necessary to detach Virginia Woolf. Woolf needed to be detached because aesthetic modernism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been commonly associated with this general aspiration of art to an independence from modern conditions. An influential example of this argument could be found in Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image, first published in , which draws a connection from the modernists back to the Romantics in terms of two doctrines: the difference between art and ordinary discourse and the “necessary isolation and estrangement” of the artist. By the mid-s, the attribution of such doctrines to aesthetic modernists was almost automatic. Andreas Huyssen lays out the case in a few quick sentences at the beginning of After the Great Divide (). “Modernism,” he says, “constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture.” Of course, Huyssen also admits that “modernism’s insistence on the autonomy of the art work, its obsessive hostility to mass culture, its radical separation from the culture of everyday life, and its programmatic distance from political, economic, and social concerns” was also challenged from within. But these challenges are then defined as coming from the “avant-garde,” a very different set of efforts from modernism as such. Thus the traditional definition of modernism confirms itself, as all the exceptions are removed to another category. This is the version of modernism against which postmodernism was defined. Starting sometime around , when Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, modernism became the monolith to which all the newest movements were opposed. Because of its roots in architectural criticism, postmodernism tended to adopt the late
modernist style of Mies van der Rohe as a synecdoche for modernism in general, and the demolition of the notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became the visual symbol of modernist isolation and indifference brought down. As it came to be formalized in essays like Ihab Hassan’s “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” first published in , modernism was defined by qualities like hierarchy, mastery, distance, and transcendence, while postmodernism stood for anarchy, participation, and immanence. Since the newest developments in art and popular culture were associated with postmodernism, which was assumed to be the polar opposite of modernism, it was retrospectively determined that modernism had always been constitutionally hostile to popular culture and thus to the real world in general. As late as , Patricia Waugh was still drawing a line between modernism and postmodernism that ran parallel to “the relations of high art to mass culture.” Thus, in her account, “the shift from autonomy to aestheticism may be regarded as paradigmatic of the entire transition from modernism to postmodernism.” With modernism thus sequestered in its grim tower, it is little wonder that critical interest in it tended to decline. The long-term association of modernism with the New Criticism also contributed to this decline. The New Criticism had originally acquired its glamorous adjective by opposing old-fashioned historical practices in literary scholarship. In the mid-s, Cleanth Brooks was still distinguishing the proper, intrinsic study of literature as such from “the study of sources, social backgrounds, history of ideas, politics, and social effects.” This distinction between the intrinsic and the extrinsic was founded on a basically Kantian definition of the artwork as self-contained and selfjustifying. But the New Critics also preserved into the twentieth century the Romantic program in which the self-sufficiency of art served as an antidote to the anarchy and confusion of the modern world. Thus their separation of literature from politics had its own political purpose, which was generally a conservative one. For a time, though, the New Criticism had the almost magical effect of seeming fashionably up to date and responsibly professional at the same time, new in its opposition to fusty old historicism but also old in its resistance to the disintegrations of the contemporary world. By the time postmodernism came along, though, this contradictory combination had pretty well come apart, so that the New Criticism was considered “not only superseded, obsolete and dead but somehow mistaken and wrong.” According to the defensive obituary published by René Wellek in , the basic New Critical distinction between the intrinsic and the extrinsic had been undermined by a “general
History’s Prehistory: Modernist Studies before the New
revolt against aesthetics per se.” In other words, the extrinsic, “the study of sources, social backgrounds, history of ideas, politics, and social effects,” had come to seem newly interesting after decades of concentration on the literary artifact itself. The reading practices promoted by the New Critics always worked best on certain kinds of literary works, ones that repaid or even required close attention to particular formal details and overall patterns of design. It was not entirely a coincidence that many of these works were modern, since the New Critics had been strongly influenced by the critical precepts of T. S. Eliot. Thus, the academic prominence of literary modernism and the professional influence of the New Criticism increased at the same time, and modernism came to be identified so closely with New Critical formalism that Chris Baldick could plausibly claim that it was “the theory of which the modernist movements provided the practice.” Because New Critical reading practice deemphasized the historical and social context in its considerations of modern works, it was possible to assume that the works themselves had been offered in the same spirit. As New Critical formalism came to seem “not only superseded, obsolete and dead but somehow mistaken and wrong,” so did the modernist works with which it had been identified. Of course, the New Criticism was never the only option for literary scholars. But most of the other schools that were active at the same time were markedly less interested in modern works, almost as if these had been trademarked by the New Critics. Myth critics, for instance, tended to work on Shakespeare or early American literature. This pattern continued with the arrival of post-structuralism. The Yale version of deconstruction, for instance, was largely promoted through the analysis of Romantic works. This preference coincided with a studied indifference to modernist works that amounted almost to hostility. The general effect of deconstruction on American studies of modernism might be exemplified by J. Hillis Miller’s hostile review of Joseph Riddel’s The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams (). Though Vincent Leitch identifies this as “the earliest large-scale work of American deconstructive criticism,” Miller excommunicated it on the grounds that it referred to “extra-linguistic reality.” For a true deconstructionist, Miller claimed, language is figurative all the way down, so that to refer literary practices to anything external, like consciousness, is to succumb to mimetic ambitions that deconstruction is purposely designed to frustrate. This does not necessarily mean, as Riddel charged in response, that Miller was privileging literary language in a manner reminiscent of the New Critics, but it did
certainly mean that the influence of deconstruction was unlikely to move the study of modernism any closer to the real world.
III A dozen years after his debate with Riddel, Miller began his MLA Presidential address with a reference to In the American Grain, as if Williams’s work were the epitome of the new trend in cultural studies. For others, though, such as Huyssen, for whom Williams did not seem to exist, modernism was still the straw man against which postmodernism, the avant-garde, and cultural studies could be defined. In fact, despite the traditional association of modernism with the principle of aesthetic autonomy and despite the apparent dominance of New Critical methods in the study of modernist texts, reference to history, politics, and the social context had never actually been banished from modernist scholarship. It is useful to remember at this point that most of the hoariest clichés about the rise of modern literature connect it to modern conditions in general. Edmund Wilson’s classic review of The Waste Land places it at least “half in the real world – the world of contemporary London.” Wilson pioneered the notion that Eliot was speaking for a whole generation, “for people grinding at barren office-routine in the cells of gigantic cities, drying up their souls in eternal toil whose products never bring them profit.” Gertrude Stein’s tagline about the “lost generation,” which appeared in print as one of the epigraphs of The Sun Also Rises, expanded this notion so that it could be applied to modern literature in general. Both Eliot and Hemingway tried to dissociate themselves from this interpretation, at least in part because it tended to drive out the idea that these might have been personal, idiosyncratic works. But it has persisted, in both positive and negative forms, and it has always been a trusty commonplace in discussions of modern literature. Though it tended to pose the modern writer as the damaged product of a destructive modernity, this reading of modernism did at least keep alive the notion that it had something to do with the world outside literature. In a number of ways, more complex responses to the real social and political concerns of modern writers worked their way into scholarly production. An important example in this respect is the career of Hugh Kenner, who came to the study of modernism by way of Marshall McLuhan and brought with him some of McLuhan’s interest in technology, science, and social change. In the s, Kenner published studies of Pound, Lewis, Joyce, and Eliot, all of which tried to establish a sensible
History’s Prehistory: Modernist Studies before the New
connection between literary technique and extra-literary ideas and ambitions. Kenner’s masterpiece in this respect is The Pound Era, first published in . It is a little hard, now that the limitations of Kenner’s chosen canon have become so apparent, to appreciate how appealing The Pound Era was to many readers in the s. Kenner wrote as if he were producing a modernist text himself, scraps of poems and fragments of anecdote magnetized into patterns that were unexpected and yet illuminating. The technique worked because, for Kenner as for his subjects, the world was inherently allusive: every bit of it existed in a dense ecology with every other bit. This meant that literature could never be discussed in isolation from art or economics or archaeology or science. To read this in the early s was all of a sudden to find the purview of literary criticism extended far beyond the limits of the text itself. When The Pound Era was first published, Pound was still alive, and Kenner was just one of a number of modernist scholars who had known their subjects personally. In many ways, the archive of modernist texts was still in the process of being established. Scholarly attention to the social and material conditions of modernism increased at this time, as these texts made their way from the small presses and little magazines in which they had originally appeared into wider circulation. Some works were just appearing for the first time. The facsimile edition of the drafts of The Waste Land, including the original opening with its vaudeville references, appeared the same year as The Pound Era. Substantial previously unpublished works by H.D., including End to Torment (), HERmione (), and The Gift (), also appeared at this time. Works that had been published separately, often in tiny print runs, became more accessible as they were gathered into collected editions. For example, Louis Martz’s edition of H.D.’s Collected Poems – () and the Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan () replaced earlier collections with more reliable texts. Work of this kind was a traditional and even routine part of the scholarly regime, but it acquired an additional topical interest at this time through the efforts of Jerome McGann, who published his Critique of Modern Textual Criticism in . An extension of the argument of Romantic Ideology, published in the same year, McGann’s Critique rejected the common scholarly opinion that any external influence by anyone other than the author represented an illegitimate adulteration of the text. In a print world, McGann insisted, texts are inevitably social products, involving collaboration between the author, the editor, the proofreader, and the
compositor. The social and material conditions of publication are not, therefore, mere noise on the signal, but part of the message itself. This argument was part of the general turn of this time toward a more culturally aware and politically involved scholarship. By the early s, with Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (), McGann was applying his ideas to the study of modernism, but the same point had already been made by George Bornstein in Representing Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation (). In the context established by works of this kind, the flood of modernist editions, biographies, and letters that appeared in the s and early s looked like something more than merely responsible scholarship. It helped to reconstitute modernism as a movement, part of even larger changes beyond it, and not just the product of solitary rebels. Much of this work, like Kenner’s, was celebratory and even hagiographical. At the same time, though, the increasingly acute political conscience of the time could not help but collide with the fact that some of Kenner’s most cherished favorites were right-wing fanatics. In the s and s, there was a steady stream of critical studies of the politics of modernism, including Richard Chace’s The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (), Dominic Manganiello’s Joyce’s Politics (), Cairns Craig’s Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (), Lucy McDiarmid’s Saving Civilization (), and Peter Nicholls’ Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (). Manganiello had the benefit of writing about a modernist whose politics were not particularly suspect, but most of the others inevitably had to be fairly critical. This was especially the case with Robert Casillo, whose Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound () sparked a contentious debate about whether or not Pound’s poetics were as thoroughly anti-Semitic as his economics and politics. However harsh the verdict might turn out to be, such books demonstrated how deeply some modernists were implicated in the political controversies of their time and thus made it more difficult to consider their works in splendid isolation. Though few of these works were explicitly Marxist in their analysis, mention of them should serve as a reminder of how Marxist criticism had kept the social and political dimensions of modernism in the discussion while these were generally ignored elsewhere. Georg Lukács’s highly critical essay “The Ideology of Modernism” had been available in English since . The European debate about the politics of modernism that had preceded this essay entered American literary scholarship primarily by way of the collection of essays, letters, and conversations of Lukács, Ernst
History’s Prehistory: Modernist Studies before the New
Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin titled Aesthetics and Politics, published by New Left Books in English translation in with an afterword by Fredric Jameson. Here, Lukács’s interlocutors, faced with his blanket dismissal of “the whole of modern literature,” had to find a way of arguing that it is not purely individualistic and escapist. Thus, they had to show in various ways that “the most striking advances in artistic technique . . . could at once be harnessed to politicizing and didactic purposes.” Though Jameson maintains that this was a much easier argument for writers working before the triumph of consumer society, it was more or less the line to be followed by modernist studies in the decades to follow. In the UK, Raymond Williams had been writing about modernism since his very first book, Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, published in . His next major book, Culture and Society: – (), might plausibly be suggested to have established the intellectual foundations for all cultural studies to follow. For Williams, as Francis Mulhern puts it, culture was the “counter discourse of capitalist modernity,” which means on the one hand that it is the fantasy by which aesthetic inclusion makes up for class division, but on the other hand that it represents the possibility of some actual alternative to that division. The longing for a “common culture” meant that it was possible for Williams to make common cause with modernists like Lawrence and Eliot, whose definition of culture as “a whole way of life” represented a serious alternative to the divisions of liberal democracy. In his posthumous contribution to the s, The Politics of Modernism, a collection that is a bit of a scrapbook, Williams assumed a greater distance, from which he was able to situate writers like Eliot within a global problematic. As Tony Pinkney puts it, Williams traced “the effects of a cultural imperialism within Europe that accompanies its domination over the rest of the world.” Modernism arrives within this framework, as the product of “a generation of ‘provincial’ immigrants to the great imperial capitals.” This is very like the argument already mounted by Terry Eagleton in Exiles and Émigrés in , which sees modernism as the product of imperial dislocation and thus as the implicit precursor to postcolonial literature. Something similar, and yet at the same time wildly different, is proposed in Fredric Jameson’s Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (). Jameson sees the modern metropole as if turned inside out, drained of meaning by its relation to global empire. Modernist style appears, within this vacuum, as an attempt to comprehend what cannot be totalized. A writer like Lewis thus pushes the old Romantic cultural
dynamic into overdrive, so that art is not just a compensation for the authenticity lost to industrialism but its gleaming rival. This is a psychological, or libidinal, process, as well as a political and aesthetic one, the harshness and violence of Lewis’s style expressing “the rage and frustration of the fragmented subject at the chains that bind it to its other and its mirror image.” Lewis’s “pseudo-couples,” like Beckett’s, get their peculiar double form from the modern situation in which people are neither sufficiently like nor sufficiently unlike those around them. Fables of Aggression thus contains early versions of a number of ideas that were to be widely influential in later years. The Political Unconscious, published just two years later, begins with the admittedly contradictory phrase that became the motto for the whole cultural studies movement: “Always historicize!” Only one of the chapters to follow is about a modernist author, but this one is the massive rereading of Conrad that situates his work, and thus a great deal of modernist fiction in general, at the fissure where nineteenth-century realism breaks apart into high literature and genre fiction. At its base, this is the old argument about culture as the alternative to industrialism, but in this case industrial literature, or mass market fiction, remains internal to its opposite, as the romance plot remains integral to Lord Jim. The social contradictions behind such works, Jameson argues in the course of some brilliant readings, are not just distant causes but active generators of plot and style. The Political Unconscious thus provided what might have inspired a whole new movement in modernist scholarship: a social and political analysis of literary form. That it did not may be attributable to the even greater influence of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (), which, for a time at least, made the whole subject of modernism seem passé. For all their radicalism, these works of Marxist criticism tended to take the modernist canon pretty much as they found it. It was just at this time, though, that the canon started to expand. This was chiefly the result of feminist scholars, working first on the “images of women” in texts by male modernists, a notable example of which is the collection Women in Joyce (), edited by Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless. But there was also plenty of room at this time, when such influential figures as Kenner and Jameson were more or less ignoring the work of women writers, for restorative projects such as Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (). Among the writers brought back into prominence by such work was Mina Loy, about whom no more than six articles had been published in the previous twenty-five years. A wider ranging and more literary version of the same project, Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of
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Modernism, appeared in , at which late date it still seemed necessary to provide basic information about authors from Djuna Barnes to Rebecca West. Of course, there was at this time a fair amount of feminist scholarship devoted to well-known figures, but relatively little of this was appearing in books. There was in fact no explicitly feminist book on Virginia Woolf before , when the collection New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, edited by Jane Marcus, appeared. In her introduction, Marcus presented the book as an attempt to get within hard covers some of the work just then being done in journals and thus to deal with the predominant feeling that “something has been missing in Virginia Woolf scholarship.” In fact, for much of the s, feminist scholarship on Woolf tended to take the form of talks or articles in edited collections, rather than full-length monographs. At this time, too, the works of African American writers who had been prominent in the s and s were coming back into circulation. This continued a process begun in the s, as the texts of writers like Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen were republished. Critical studies like James O. Young’s Black Writers of the Thirties (), Arthur P. Davis’s From the Dark Tower (), Margaret Perry’s Silence to the Drums (), and Tony Martin’s Literary Garveyism () were therefore working on what could seem like new territory. This work was coordinated with a critical theory of modernism in Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (). But this was still primarily a defensive maneuver, posed against the assumption that the Harlem Renaissance had failed because it had not met the standards set by literary and academic modernists. Though Baker offered a new concept of literary innovation, one that made it much easier to see the real contributions of the writers of the Renaissance, he wrote about modernism from an explicitly postmodern position, which meant that he accepted the conventional estimation of modernism instead of trying to change it. Baker was prominent at this time in efforts to expand the canon, most notably perhaps as co-editor with Leslie Fiedler of the collection Opening Up the Canon (). At about the same time, Fiedler published What Was Literature? Class Culture and Mass Society (), a concatenation of events that suggests the natural connection between these two projects: to restore to the scholarly record literature written by women and writers of color and to consider a wide range of cultural materials previously ignored by literary scholarship. The latter had been part of Fiedler’s polemic since the s, and though he tended to pose as a lonely rebel, it was representative of a trend toward broad cultural analysis that had always
been present in American literary scholarship. In the late s, this trend met the study of modern literature in a few notable works: Michael Denning’s Mechanic Accents (), Lisa Steinman’s Made in America (), and Cecilia Tichi’s Shifting Gears (). These are works that might now be considered classics of modernist cultural studies, and their coincidental appearance in a single year suggests a general trend. Still, this is a year after Zwerdling’s book on Woolf, and this relatively late date seems evidence of the delayed effect that the general turn toward culture, history, and politics had on the study of modernism.
IV Considering all these factors, then, the announcement of an explicitly modernist cultural studies movement in the late s might seem a seriously belated event. If the general trend toward cultural studies had already arrived by the mid-s, if the effort to open up the canon was clearly under way at least by the early s, if the study of modernism itself had always had within it at least some tendencies leading in the same direction, then why did it take so long for modernist scholarship as a whole to catch up? One simple answer has to do with the sheer strength of the traditional association of modernity with autonomy and of modernist works with the New Critical emphasis on the isolated text. But a more proximate cause was the priority of postmodernism, which arrogated to itself all the cultural forces and materials that might have been used by a broader modernist studies. For postmodernism was not just a historical period following modernism but also a historical alternative to it, a counterpart to the avant-garde as it was defined by Peter Bu¨rger in a work first translated into English in . The decline in influence of the very idea of postmodernism not only allowed but in fact necessitated the rise of a new modernist studies. A sense of the death of postmodernism began to take hold in the early s, and it is fairly common now to think of it as a period that ended at about that time. There are many reasons for its demise, including sheer cultural boredom. As time passed, it also seemed more and more obvious that the differences between what had been called modernity and what was being called postmodernity were not epochal but episodic. But it may also be that the association between postmodernism and cultural studies, an association proposed as natural by writers like Huyssen in the s, was not as inevitable as it then seemed. For one thing, the general playfulness of postmodernism, the lack of seriousness that supposedly differentiated it
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from its dour predecessor, did not wear well as scholarly attention turned to political issues. But it was hard in any case for a period now thought to have encompassed about twenty years to surpass in scope and depth a rival that is sometimes stretched out to cover more than a hundred. There is just so much more modernism. This is true not just in historical scope but also in artistic depth. No matter how much fully justified criticism attaches to T. S. Eliot, he is not likely to be displaced by Donald Barthelme. The establishment of modernist cultural studies as an official discipline with its own association and its own journal thus coincided with a general shift in interest from postmodernism back to the modernism it had apparently displaced. The critical enterprise Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz call the new modernist studies coexists with a number of other new modernisms, with remodernism, hypermodernism, automodernism, altermodernism, digimodernism, and metamodernism. These are some of the names proposed for the period we live in now, which is generally perceived as a permutation of, not the opposite of, the period formerly known as modern. These terms evince the common opinion that any new understanding of the contemporary situation must start with a thorough understanding of modernity in general. This belief in what a recent collection has called the contemporaneity of modernism is the essential condition for the existence of the new modernist studies. Despite their historical correlation, though, the new modernist studies and these new modernisms exist in almost complete isolation from one another. One reason is that terms like altermodernism are applied in a visual arts context, while the new modernist studies, for all its attempts to diversify, remains generally located in English departments. More fundamentally, though, new terms like altermodernism betray an ambition toward a new theory of modernity, one that would start where the old ones started but could stretch itself into the present. But the new modernist studies, devoted as it is to historical context, has always been notoriously weak in just this area. The two efforts on which the new field has been based, the extension of the literary franchise to writers and audiences previously denied it, and the expansion of the definition of art to include materials previously ignored by scholarship, are generally felt to be self-justifying because they seem historically inevitable. This silently assumes a theory much like the one advanced by Jacques Rancière, in which the democratization of art, the steady dismantling of hierarchies of style and subject matter, is the hallmark of modernity. Assumptions of this kind, though, are buried too deeply within practice to emerge explicitly as theoretical or programmatic statements.
Thus, the need expressed by all these candidate terms – altermodernism, hypermodernism – for a new theory of the modern is not being met by the new modernist studies. This may be one reason why the influence of the group has been limited to its own membership. Since so much of the work done within this context is empirical, even descriptive, in nature, it is not likely to appeal to anyone not already avid for information about the period. This is all the more so since the methodology generally used in such studies was pioneered in other fields, such as the Renaissance. Finally, at this point, a couple of decades after the initial institutionalization of the new modernist studies, the appeal of purely empirical historical studies may start to wear thin. As Henry James and Jacques Derrida have both noted, context is potentially infinite, and thus the work of providing historical context for literary works can go on forever, until it begins to seem merely repetitive. Still, the political urgency that began to be felt in modernist scholarship of the s has not diminished. It has spread out into fields like queer studies that were hardly imagined thirty years ago, and it has given rise to a kind of globalism starkly different from the one in place when courses on the topic were still being called Commonwealth Literature. Given the tendency of the world today, it does not seem likely that a project of literary democratization will ever run out of work to do. For such a project, though, one of the most sobering realizations must be that it has had so little effect on the popular image of modern art and literature. For the most part, this is still dominated by studies like Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (), the ancient thesis of which is obvious from its subtitle. According to a blurb for Gay’s book, modernism is “a thrilling pageant of heretics,” of writers and artists defined by their opposition to the larger world around them. It is almost as if the decades of work connecting modern writers and artists back to the real world had never been done. And it does not seem likely that this popular conception, derived as it is from the traditional association of modernity with autonomy, will be dislodged by more information, without a larger redefinition of what modernism has come to mean.
Notes Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Ibid., . J. Hillis Miller, “The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base,” PMLA . (), .
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Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, tr. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, tr. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, –. Chris Baldick, Criticism and Literary Theory to the Present (London: Longman, ), . For a more general European argument along the same lines, see Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), . Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (; rpt. New York: Vintage, ), . Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), vii. Ibid. See also . Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, ), –. Patricia Waugh, “Postmodernism,” in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical, and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Christa Knellwolf and Christopher Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . For a classic statement, see Cleanth Brooks, “Literary History vs. Criticism,” Kenyon Review (), –. Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . See also René Wellek, “The New Criticism: Pro and Contra,” Critical Inquiry (), –. Leitch, American Literary Criticism, . Wellek, “The New Criticism,” . Ibid., . Baldick, Criticism and Literary Theory, . Leitch, American Literary Criticism, , . Ibid., . Edmund Wilson, “The Poetry of Drouth,” The Dial (December ), . Ibid., . Jennifer Wicke, “Hugh Kenner’s Pound of Flesh,” Modernism/modernity (), –. Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, ), –. Theodor Adorno, “Reconciliation under Duress,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson, and Francis Mulhern (London: Verso, ), . Fredric Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” in ibid., . Francis Mulhern, “‘Culture and Society,’ Then and Now,” New Left Review (), –. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: – (; rpt., New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
Tony Pinkney, introduction to The Politics of Modernism, by Raymond Williams (London: Verso, ), . Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Jane Marcus, introduction to New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), xiii. See the declaration: “Today, we are ‘postmodern.’” Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris, eds., Supplanting the Postmodern (New York: Bloomsbury, ), xv–xvi. Ibid., xxiii. Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges, eds., The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture (New York: Routledge, ). Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction, tr. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, ).
Scholarship’s Turn Origins and Effects of the New Modernist Studies Mark Wollaeger
Post-structuralism taught us that it is futile to seek origins, but we have learned to take beginnings seriously. If modernist studies began to coalesce as an academic field in the s, when and how did the “new” modernist studies begin? With the publication of the journal Modernism/modernity in ? In , when the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) was founded? Or did it emerge between and , with the creation of at least six book series on modernism? One thing is certain: by the time it became possible in for a Marxist literary critic to pillory a “movement” (exemplified by an article, anthology, and book) under the acronym “NMS,” a professional formation had come into being. Movements become recognizable as such through multiple forms of institutional recognition as well as the through the labors of the individuals who shape and are shaped by institutions. This chapter provides an institutional history of the new modernist studies by attending to the stated goals of significant actors within the shifting matrix of what has counted as modernist studies in the United States during the past quarter century and by tracking the institutional effects of these actors. It relies in part on a method not often used in literary studies, the questionnaire: forms asking for comments on aims, accomplishments, regrets, and prognostications were distributed to past MSA presidents, editors of book series, editors of Modernism/modernity, and acquisitions editors. It draws also on both rigorous and relatively casual forms of quantitative analysis. This blended approach is intended to provide a more complete account of the new modernist studies than has previously been offered and a new way to begin answering some fundamental questions: How much influence has the movement had? Where have its effects been felt and how can they be measured? Is “NMS” more than a brand? The first two MSA conferences in and were billed as “New Modernisms,” but the putative newness of the new modernist studies antedates the conferences, the claim first appearing within a specific
network of modernist scholars, one of whom later became an MSA president. At the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in San Diego, Susan Stanford Friedman was instrumental in arranging three sessions under the rubric “The New Modernist Studies,” all under the auspices of the Division on Twentieth-Century American Literature. Friedman, chair of the division’s executive committee, was already a wellestablished figure in modernist and feminist studies, having published two monographs and two co-edited collections over the previous decade. Friedman recalls that she modeled the title after Elaine Showalter’s influential edited volume The New Feminist Criticism () and that in the mid-nineties she was trying to assemble a collection of essays under the same title as the panel rubric. The divisional sessions were likely part of Friedman’s effort to gather contributions. The titles of the MLA talks mark both efforts to open the field to new directions and continuations of extant paradigms. The first session, subtitled “Definitional Problematics” and presided over by poet and feminist theorist Rachel Blau DuPlessis, included Carla Caplan’s “Modernist Expansion and ‘Modernism’ under Erasure: Problems in Reconstructing Cultural Conflict,” Marianne DeKoven’s “Postmodern Modernism,” and Cyraina E. Johnson-Roullier’s “The Looking Glass, Cracked.” Caplan’s title anticipates the field’s increasing focus on canon revision and the recovery of political contexts; DeKoven’s names the phenomenon frequently blamed for modernism’s loss of prestige during the s; and Johnson-Roullier’s represents the growing influence of postcolonial studies (via Stephen Dedalus’s “cracked lookingglass of a servant” in Ulysses). The second session, subtitled “Cultural Narratives of Race, Gender, and Sexuality” and presided over by Friedman, included a paper by DuPlessis, “HOO, HOO, HOO: Racial Anxieties and Poetic Desires,” Joseph Allen Boone’s “Queer Sites in Modernism: Paris, Greenwich Village, Harlem,” and Daylanne K. English’s “W. E. B. Du Bois and T. S. Eliot: A Race of Writers?” These titles respectively evoke the field’s growing interest in race as subtext in white modernism; new modernist work on queer sexuality in the wake of Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (); and efforts to place white and black writers into dialogue. The third session, “Modernism after Poststructuralism and Postmodernism,” seems to have been designed to use earlier paradigms in order to peer forward: hence “‘Modernism’ after ‘French Feminism’” by Elizabeth A. Hirsch, and “Affirmative Terrors: The Borders of Philosophical Modernism” by Jacques Lezra. The title of the third paper, Michael Tratner’s “Mass Minds and Modernist Forms: Political and Aesthetic Theory in the Early Twentieth Century,”
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sounds the historicist, political, and interdisciplinary notes that would become prominent features of the kind of modernist studies that these three sessions aimed to exemplify and promote.
Modernist Studies Association and Conference As we will see in a moment, the inaugural MSA conference in drew its name from Friedman’s panels via a feminist network that included eight of the ten MLA speakers. But the prime mover in the founding of the MSA in spring was Michael Coyle, who had been discussing the need for a new professional organization with his colleague Burton Hatlen since . Hatlen was unable to continue with the project, but when Coyle met Gail McDonald at the American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Baltimore, they began to plan. As McDonald recalls, the ALA at the time was composed mainly of single-author groups, each of which was guaranteed a session, and she and Coyle, working on Eliot and Pound, respectively, were underwhelmed by the quality of the sessions. The next step was to invite nearly twenty scholars to discuss the creation of a new professional organization: “After the initial excitement there remained four . . . Coyle, Cassandra Laity, Gail McDonald, and Sanford Schwartz. Schwartz took on the task of hosting the first conference at Penn State University, and brought aboard the fifth founding member, Mark Morrison, to help.” Laity recalls that during planning for the first conference, she was “in constant correspondence with Susan [Friedman],” so it appears that the conference title “New Modernisms” passed from Friedman to Laity. Newness as revitalization features prominently in the earliest mission statement posted on the MSA webpages, a statement that remains unchanged to this day: “The Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the later nineteenth- through the mid-twentieth century. The organization aims to develop an international and interdisciplinary forum to promote exchange among scholars in this revitalized and rapidly changing field.” The historicism announced here has endured at MSA conferences and in the field generally, despite some recent expressions of discontent with a relative lack of new theories of modernism and especially of modernity. International and interdisciplinary participation, in contrast, remain more aspirational. The first two MSA presidents, Coyle (–) and McDonald (–), focused mainly on running successful conferences, and
largely succeeded. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that about people were expected to attend the inaugural conference in and close to showed up; Coyle recalls an even greater disparity: “We budgeted for a conference of – people – but instead got numbers closer to .” Three plenary sessions on “New Modernisms” included a number of high-profile modernists, such as Charles Altieri, Houston Baker, and Peter Nicholls, as well as a partial reprise of the MLA sessions in joint papers by Friedman and DuPlessis. The conference featured three poetry readings (a tradition that lasted several years before largely petering out), screenings of classic films from early cinema, and performances of both popular and elite music: jazz by a trio called the Hip Replacements; and Debussy, Ives, Stravinsky, Webern, Poulenc, and Hindemith by members of the Penn State Music Department. The Chronicle’s article “New Life for Modernism” undoubtedly gave the MSA an early boost by describing the conference with the common modernist trope of rebirth. The article also spread the familiar, because basically true, story of how modernism came to need resuscitation: “Over lunch, the organizers described how the rise of postmodernism and the political critique of modernist writing had made their intellectual allegiances somehow suspect.” At least one of the organizers recalls that the reporter, Scott Heller, distrusted what he considered hype from young scholars and wanted also to talk to more senior people. Perhaps that’s why the article ends with a resonant quote from Friedman: “A return to modernism at the end of the millennium,” she said, “is not a farewell but a new beginning.” The celebratory article also registers some disappointments and concerns. Conference organizers shared two broad aims: “to make the conference truly interdisciplinary and truly international.” But while the conference organizers hoped for “as many sessions on art and music as on literature,” “English professors made up the bulk of attendees,” and nearly percent of all attendees came from North America; none came from a non-Anglophone locale. In retrospect, some of the concerns look more prescient than others. Heller reports the worry that a conference on modernism was likely to consolidate the existing canon; others, evidently afraid that papers on non-literary cultural forms could be the thin edge of a cultural studies wedge, fretted that “literature would get lost amid the study of art, music, film, fashion, and city life.” Literature remains more than well represented in modernist studies, but quantitative analysis raises questions about how much the modernist canon has evolved over the past two decades (a topic to which I will return), and many members of the
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organization have noted that interdisciplinary and international representation within it has never been as strong as initially hoped. As Gail McDonald observes in her questionnaire, the MSA has had at best limited success in diversifying itself. Although nearly every respondent to the MSA presidents’ questionnaire reports having aimed, as one recent president put it, “to improve diversity” with respect to “gender,” “ethnicity,” “interdisciplinarity,” and “international [representation]” (Q), no one believes sufficient progress has been made on any of these issues. Indeed, the fact that nearly every president who responded cites the same diversity goals underscores the problem. Kevin Dettmar (–), third president of the MSA, worked closely with Coyle to arrange the MSA’s first international conference, which was hosted jointly by the University of Birmingham and the University of Sussex at Birmingham in . Since then, six more conferences have been held outside the United States: four in Canada (Vancouver ; Montreal ; Victoria ; Toronto ); one again in the UK (Sussex ); and one in continental Europe (Amsterdam ). But as the MSA’s sixteenth president Stephen Ross points out, the problem with international MSA conferences is that “North American scholars frequently don’t go to the international locations, and non-North American scholars don’t come to the North American-based conferences”; therefore, there is “less intermingling” than in conferences that do not draw mainly on a single professional organization (Q). And Ross’s reference to “North American” scholars is well taken. To a large degree the MSA remains a North American organization: in US and Canadian participants constituted percent of the total membership. If constraints of time and money have undermined attempts to draw a more international crowd to the MSA conference, the persistence of disciplinary silos has kept the conference a largely literary affair. This is ironic insofar as the interdisciplinary ethos supplied by the rise of cultural studies is cited in nearly every account of the new modernist studies. But cultural studies itself has historically relied less on interdisciplinary collaboration than on cross-disciplinary poaching by individual scholars. The MSA tried to bake interdisciplinarity and internationalism into its administrative structure in when the board created subcommittees to advance on both these fronts. But as the first Chair of the Subcommittee on Interdisciplinarity (–), I can testify that it is very difficult to increase interdisciplinary participation: scholars from other disciplines understandably prefer to attend conferences of their peers – where professional networks are built, after all – and too few MSA regulars attend
non-literary talks. When as interdisciplinary chair I invited people from other disciplines who had attended previous conferences to return with their colleagues, I received an email from a music scholar noting that the prospect of speaking again to empty seats was not enticing. The MSA has tried other approaches, from interdisciplinary seminars to interdisciplinary roundtables featuring “sure draws,” but in an age of hyperspecialization, the pull of intradisciplinary rewards has helped keep literature at the heart of the MSA. Just as challenging has been the relative whiteness of the MSA and its conference. As Friedman observes, “The conference participants are heavily white, and I am not sure it is a very comfortable place for scholars of color and for international scholars from outside Europe” (Q). Although the first two issues of Modernism/modernity (later the official publication of the MSA) focused on race, five years later the first conference included relatively few sessions on race or ethnicity. And although the number of such sessions has increased over the years, the study of race and ethnicity has not yet taken deep root in the conference, and scholars of color have represented only a small portion of attendees. Past presidents report that efforts to draw more scholars of African American culture and race studies to the conference and to recruit people of color to the board have met with only limited success. Writing of her early career entry into the field of modernism, Cyraina Johnson-Roullier has observed that “moving as a lone African American into a world that was largely white, sometimes hostile, at times unfriendly, but most often, just indifferent” was profoundly challenging, not least because she often was advised to specialize instead in African American literature. Having nevertheless chosen modernism and having been a member of the MSA since its inception, Johnson-Roullier reports that “MSA has not actually been a very comfortable place for scholars of color, and, in many ways, still isn’t.” For instance, in a mostly white organization she found it nearly impossible “to form the kinds of networks that [her] colleagues did.” Johnson-Roullier adds, however, that while her first ten years or so in the MSA were difficult, the situation has greatly improved and she now has “much more of a cohort of like-minded scholars among the membership.” The MSA has made clear its desire to take up the challenge in its own ranks and is planning a number of new initiatives that it hopes will attract a more diverse membership and contribute to the creation of a more welcoming professional organization. One way to increase participation from scholars in African American Studies and other race- and
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ethnicity-oriented fields seems straightforward: scholars working in these fields have many venues in which they can present their work, but most attend the annual conference of the American Studies Association (ASA), and from to , the ASA and MSA conferences were frequently scheduled for the same weekend or very close together, making it difficult for people to attend both, let alone make it a regular practice. The MSA board reports that it intends to coordinate more reliably with the ASA in the future. All agree, however, that redressing the complexly overdetermined problem of inclusiveness will require much more than a change in organizational schedules; it will mean grappling, for example, with the question of why more scholars of color do not seek to become modernists in the first place. While questionnaire responses from past presidents often address the problem of racial diversity, they do not acknowledge the perception that the MSA remains something of an old boys’ club. From a structural perspective, the critique may at first seem surprising: as we have seen, the MSA included from the start a strong feminist network of participants and leaders; ten of the MSA’s nineteen presidents have been women; and most conferences have featured feminist roundtables or forums designed to reflect on both the conference proceedings and the field at large. But it is clear that for some members the MSA feels more patriarchal than comparable professional organizations. Urmila Seshagiri offered a bracing corrective to complacency on this front in a cluster of essays in Print Plus, the online complement to Modernism/modernity, entitled “Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis.” Noting that the cluster is Modernism/modernity’s first forum dedicated to feminism and women modernists in its nearly twenty-five years of operation, Seshagiri makes a persuasive case that even though “the relationship between modernism and modernity was elementally shaped by women, feminists, and feminist women,” there is an “aporia between feminism’s vitality for modernism, on one hand, and the scholarly neglect of that vitality, on the other.” Among her pieces of evidence is a devastating list of special issues, roundtables, and archival features from Modernism/modernity, of which she observes: “Even though several of these themed issues feature excellent feminist scholarship, the artists, critics, and philosophers named for intellectual colloquy – Beckett, Eliot (Eliot, Eliot), Jolas, Joyce (Joyce, Joyce), Kafka, Kenner, Lewis, Marinetti, Wallace, Wittgenstein – are all Anglo-European men. There are no women.” The five essays in the cluster speak elegantly to various ways in which patriarchy still structures many professional and personal transactions in the field. One participant in the cluster, Anne
Fernald, remarked by email: “My sense that Modernism/modernity would never be interested in my work led me to do the special issue [“Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism,” Summer ] for Modern Fiction Studies.” The bottom line, Fernald suggests, is that “prestige in the field has not mainly been with feminist theory or with scholars whose primary affiliations are feminist.” There are several reasons to expect to change on this score. The number of women published in Modernism/modernity spiked with its inaugural MSA conference issue, edited by Cassandra Laity in September . Laity, moreover, has since founded a new journal, Feminist Modernist Studies (), which has been met with much enthusiasm, and a companion professional organization, the Feminist inter/Modernist Association (FiMA), has been founded as well. In addition, beginning in , under the co-editorship of Debra Rae Cohen the number of women authoring articles in Modernism/modernity noticeably increased. Thus, whereas the first two numbers of the journal included thirteen articles by men and three by women (two of whom were translated into English by a male translator) and twenty reviews by men and two by women, today women tend to account for – percent of published contributions overall. Presumably this more balanced trend will continue under Anne Fernald, who succeeded Cohen in summer , and Christopher Bush, who began working with Cohen as co-editor in . Finally, a published review of the MSA conference in Columbus, Ohio, suggested that its program could serve as “a blueprint for future iterations,” in part because a digital exhibit on gender and photography organized by Alix Beeston seemed “an organ, rather than an appendage, of the conference.” Finally, even though the MSA itself has not yet become a truly international organization, it has had international effects by helping to inspire a number of professional organizations worldwide. The British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) was organized by Andrew Thacker, Daniella Caselli, and Rebecca Beasley in : the organization’s “formal announcement coincided with the first BAMS conference . . . in Glasgow in December .” Like many European scholars, the founders of BAMS felt that the MSA was “an American organization that operates on a big corporate scale,” and BAMS was designed in part “to facilitate links [in the UK] between existing modernist networks and centres including the Modernist Cultures group at Birmingham, the London Modernism Seminar . . . and the Northern Modernism Seminar” (Q, McDonald). The Australasian Modernist Studies Network (AMSN) was also founded in and held its first conference in . Networks
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founded after BAMS and AMSN include the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies (); Birmingham’s Centre for Modernist Cultures (); the Société d’études modernistes (SEM) at the Sorbonne (); the New Zealand Modernist Studies Consortium (); the Centre for European Modernism Studies in Perugia (); the Modernist Network Cymru in Wales (); the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA, ); and Modernist Studies Ireland (). Like BAMS, MSIA, SEM, and AMSN are now officially affiliated with the MSA, and all have held well-attended, vibrant conferences. Insofar as this network of affiliated organizations (including the MSA) is entitled to run sessions at one another’s meetings, international scholars (whose registration fees are waived) may mix more at future conferences. Broadly speaking, the consolidation and evolution of the MSA have significantly changed the field by establishing a large-scale forum for the sharing of new work on modernism. As one president puts it, “Prior to MSA . . . scholars of modernism had virtually no common framework for exchanging ideas [apart from Modernism/modernity] and were still laboring in an environment of anti-modernist prejudice related to the regnant (putative) cool of a postmodernism understood as having displaced modernism’s mandarin stodginess”: “To be able to meet with so many other scholars who cared about and indeed valued modernist writing, and modernism across the arts, was not only illuminating but also therapeutic and affirming” (Q). Another argues that this forum has supported “important expansions of the field from a narrow set of canonical modernist texts to incorporate the long twentieth century, a variety of aesthetic forms, a global reach, and better integration of modernist studies with such interdisciplinary fields as environmental and animal studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies/Queer studies, postcolonial studies, media studies, etc.” (Q). Fundamentally, the MSA, “its conference and its association with Modernism/modernity, has shaped the field by helping scholars to understand what’s of interest to their peers” (Q).
Modernist Publishing: Modernism/modernity and Modernist Book Series Although the proliferation of modernist studies organizations around the world may suggest that the new modernist studies is enjoying increasingly global influence, the rubric “modernist” seems to hold limited, uneven purchase beyond the Anglophone academic world. This limitation is thrown into relief by the different valences of “modernism” versus
“avant-garde” in Anglo-American and European academic usage and in modernist sectors of the publishing industry. Modernism/modernity, the MSA’s official journal since , was founded in by Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. From the outset, it met a significant need for a journal devoted to international modernist studies. Its stated aims will sound familiar: “to maintain a sense of the international dimensions of modernism” and “to bring into dialogue writers in the social sciences engaged by issues of modernity and modernization and scholars of the literary and fine arts committed to the history of modernism in the arts.” Rainey and von Hallberg conceded that “it will be much easier to retain the international scope of modernism than it will be to facilitate exchange across the disciplinary boundaries separating literary critics and political theorists, economists and musicologists.” Initially they fared better on these goals than the MSA would: the first two numbers, both devoted to race, included articles and reviews not just by the usual English department suspects but by scholars of architecture, history and anthropology, cultural history, Spanish and Portuguese, ethnomusicology, and sociology. The second issue also included three newly translated pieces, two from Italian, one from German. The editorial history of Modernism/modernity reflects the consolidation of the MSA’s influence on modernist studies in the United States over the past decade. Early on, the two founding editors came to find effective collaboration impossible; they each began editing alternate numbers. The journal’s subscription rate suffered, and if the MSA and Johns Hopkins University Press had not agreed to make Modernism/modernity the MSA’s official publication in , it would have folded. (The MSA’s membership then was around –,, about where it remains today.) The affiliation entitled the MSA to add a co-editor, Cassandra Laity (–), to the two appointed by the press. Until , however, the MSA co-editor was limited to publishing papers from the annual conference. From to the three editors worked independently in rotation from issue to issue, with Rainey also handling the book review section. Although Modernism/modernity won the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement (most improved journal) in from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the MSA board observed continuing difficulties in the editorial arrangement and in reached an agreement with Johns Hopkins University Press under which the number of editors was reduced to two, both of them appointed by the MSA board. In co-editor Debra Rae Cohen created Print Plus, an
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open digital publication platform. Designed “to provide a peer-reviewed, online academic environment for multimedia argument-based research,” Print Plus won an Association of American Publications award for Innovation in Journal Publication in . Cooperation among individuals – not yet the norm in literary studies – invariably strengthens institutional aims. But the influence of the MSA and its journal has also been circumscribed by what can be called Anglo-NorthAmericanism. As is common in Anglo-American circles, all editors of Modernism/modernity have tended to use “modernism” as an umbrella term that includes what European scholars are more likely to call “the avant-garde.” Even the founding editors, Rainey and von Hallberg, who have worked extensively on European and American avant-gardes, did not insist on a distinction that the name of their journal did not acknowledge either. European scholars, in contrast, place more weight on differentiating the two in order () to acknowledge that “modernism” tends to carry a periodizing meaning in a way that “avant-garde” does not; () to posit an interdependent relationship in which the avant-garde, more norm-breaking than modernism, often functions, in Astradur Eysteinsson’s words, to tease out “the radical elements of modernism whenever it appears to be losing its edge”; and () to underscore that the terminological distinction also names a culturalhistorical difference between European and Anglo-American culture. In continental Europe multiple languages and easy movement across national borders were conducive to a massive proliferation of “isms” in a way that was not the case in North America and the UK: more experimentalist movements sprang up on the Continent than anywhere else, and only a fraction ever took root outside Europe. This third point is crucial insofar as academic study of European cultural ferment necessarily had to be comparative, multimodal, and culturalist in a way Anglophone criticism did not. Thus, despite the existence of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM, founded in ) and the Centre for European Modernism Studies (CEMS, ), Sacha Bru (a founder of EAM) has remarked that in Europe “modernism” still “sounds somewhat alien to many” (Q). Increasing usage of the term in Europe probably has to do with the growing use of English as a lingua franca in European professional organizations (EAM, for instance, has three official languages: German, French, and English; those without German and French use English), and with an increase in cross-disciplinary comparison: “modernism” in Europe has long been an important term in architecture and the
visual arts, and cross-media comparative study over the past twenty years has been spreading the term to literary studies. The history of modernist studies book series reinforces the differences between Anglophone and non-Anglophone literary circles. When in Kevin Dettmar and I founded what we understood as the first series in modernist studies, Modernist Literature & Culture (MLC), through New York’s branch of Oxford University Press, we were unaware of two other series, one in the United States, one in Europe. Penn State’s Refiguring Modernism had launched in . From a European perspective, Refiguring Modernism looks like a series on the avant-garde: to this day it publishes multidisciplinary volumes on art, literature, science, and cultural history. In the wake of MLC and Refiguring Modernism, a number of series sprung up in the United States: Hopkins Studies in Modernism (Douglas Mao, editor) began to form in and published its first volume in ; Bloomsbury and Columbia University Press, respectively, brought out Historicizing Modernism (Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, co-editors) and Modernist Latitudes (Paul SaintAmour and Jessica Berman, co-editors) in ; Bloomsbury started up two additional series in : Modernist Archives (Feldman and Tonning, co-editors) and New Modernisms (Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, co-editors). Latham and Rogers underscore how established the “new modernist studies” had become by then: “struck by the sheer mass” of new work in modernist studies over the previous two decades, they decided that the field needed research guides to address what they considered a serious problem: “too much to read and digest, in too many places and directions” (Q). Books in this series, the editors report, seem to appeal in particular to graduate students trying to grasp the contours of the field. Apart from Refiguring Modernism, all these US series focus largely on literature understood from an interdisciplinary perspective. The European publishing scene looks notably different owing to its focus on the avant-garde. Rodopi (headquartered in Amsterdam) started a book series called Avant-Garde Critical Studies in , nearly two decades before the first modernism book series in the United States. The international academic publisher Brill (headquartered in Leiden) later acquired Rodopi, and only in did Brill add a series called Literary Modernisms. Asked how Brill slots books into one series or the other, acquisitions editor Masja Horn replied that the press understands “avantgarde” as comprising more politically and socially engaged artists, whereas “modernism” refers to “developments that run through the entire society, like industrialism, changes in the history of thought, medicine, etc.”; but
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the modernism series also focuses primarily on literature, while the avantgarde series covers “disciplines such as literature, music, architecture, art history and media studies,” “preferably in multi-disciplinary volumes” (Q). For these reasons, although “new modernist studies” is a useful rubric for American publishers – in the words of one US acquisitions editor, “it broadly signifies a more capacious approach to modernist studies that examines writers and modernist works in a variety of contexts and draws on approaches from other fields and sub-fields within literary studies” (Q) – it has little purchase in Europe. Horn observes, “I must confess that I do not see the purpose of ‘new modernism’ as a term.” Thus the founding of book series in the United States devoted to the new modernist studies has had only limited effect in Europe, where the dominant approach to experimental literature, grounded most often in study of European avant-gardes, has for decades looked like what the Anglophone world started to call the new modernist studies in the mids. The close identification of modernist literature with the New Criticism in the United States undoubtedly militated against the kind of comparative, multimodal, and interdisciplinary approach that developed in Europe. But it is also the case that the relative linguistic homogeneity of US English departments (Comparative Literature departments have always been outliers) and the geographic isolation of the United States also discouraged the more comparative culturalist approaches undertaken in Europe. Recall in this context that Friedman’s ground-breaking MLA panels were sponsored by the Division of Twentieth-Century American Literature, that Coyle and McDonald met at the American Literature Association conference, and that both at the time were focused on Eliot and Pound. This is not to say that the new modernist studies is merely a parochial rill in the great ocean of modern literature studies. Anglophone cultural and economic capital make any approach promoted by North America and the UK into a potent global presence. The new modernist studies is, however, a distinctly Anglophone phenomenon whose salient characteristics have not stood out as particularly new in the context of nonAnglophone literary studies. The most recent US book series, Modernism and the Avant-Garde (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, ), selfconsciously adopts a more European perspective precisely to address the limitations of modernism as a covering term. According to founding editor Stephen Ross, “We kept both terms in part to resonate with the nonAnglo-American world, but also to acknowledge that where ‘modernism’ fails to signify, ‘the avant-garde’ often does.” Ross began the series,
moreover, because “the simple volume of research being done by American scholars just overwhelms the interesting and methodologically very different work being done in other places around the world” (Q). In addition, Modernist Latitudes, founded by Saint-Amour and Berman, aims to pay “particular attention to the texts and contexts of those latitudes (Africa, Latin America, Australia, Asia, Southern Europe, and even the rural United States) that have long been misrecognized as ancillary to the canonical modernisms of the global North,” and to date their list is more globally diverse than most.
How New Is New? Given that the “new modernist studies” was constituted in part by a desire to strip away some of the myths of modernism established by its early critics, some of whom personally knew members of the Men of , it is possibly dubious for this chapter to draw so much on questionnaires filled out by past presidents, editors of book series, and publishers, all of whom have a vested interest in the topic. Even more to the point, I served as the MSA’s fifth president and co-founded a book series in modernism. What might a more rigorous quantitative analysis reveal about the effects of the new modernist studies? Here we can turn to Andrew Goldstone’s “Modernist Studies without Modernism,” which focuses on “the mediating processes by which the direction of modernist studies diverges from very widely agreed-upon principles of breadth and diversity.” The quantitative dimension of Goldstone’s argument, supplemented by qualitative assessments of influential published claims about the field, relies on “thousands of entries downloaded from the online MLA International Bibliography” (). Goldstone undertakes a comparative analysis of subject headings from the Journal of Modern Literature, Modernism/modernity, and Modern Fiction Studies as well as a broader selection of books and journal articles; he finds that the mid-s “do not produce a radical rupture in the configuration of modernist studies’ collective choice of objects” (). “Modernist studies is indeed expanding impressively,” Goldstone acknowledges, especially in comparison with its highly restricted early canon, but far less so than the “new” in new modernist studies would imply (). Attention to authors whose names appear in the table of contents of books published in prominent modernism series underscores the point: “preferential attachment” to established objects of value (Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Eliot, Conrad, Beckett, for instance) ensures that “already popular subjects tend to receive
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more attention than others” (). The list of authors most often studied, therefore, never strays far from “a small, nearly invariant hypercanon of central figures” that has been in place since (). A Gertrude Stein or Katherine Mansfield may enter the list (Goldstone notes that “decisive transformations” tend to emerge from “organizational and symbolic resources external to modernist studies,” such as feminism, an intellectual movement that extends far beyond modernist studies []), but even with the significant intervention of feminism, Goldstone argues, the overall distribution of attention remains relatively constant. Detailed analysis of Goldstone’s methodology is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the essay’s challenge to modernist studies’ self-conception is powerful. Goldstone’s most important claim is that the slow rate of change in the modernist canon derives from the use of modernism as a term of approbation. No one would claim that categorization as Victorian or American amounts to a marker of value, but with modernism, Goldstone argues, “to be recognized as suitably innovative or experimental – suitably ‘modernist’ – requires comparison with an existing modernist standard, in ways that tend to be favorable to the standard” (). Tellingly, Goldstone compares the distribution of attention in three major Americanist journals and finds that they are significantly less concentrated on a select group of authors than are the Journal of Modern Literature and Modernism/modernity. Goldstone is alive to the possible limitations of his quantitative analysis: subject headings are “an imperfect proxy for an author’s symbolic capital within academic literary studies,” and because subject headings are not “exhaustive,” additional authors discussed in articles may not appear in headings supplied by MLA bibliographers (–). Goldstone also acknowledges that changes in objects do not equate to changes in approach: modernist scholars undoubtedly treat texts very differently than they did in , but his analysis indicates that “new approaches in modernist studies change the objects of study rather slowly” (). What counts as modernist, one could say, is propped on a highly select collection of authors and texts. Yet here we may raise some questions beyond the space of disputation opened by Goldstone’s own caveats. It is certainly true that the new modernist studies has not transcended the selectivity presupposed by the term “modernist” itself. But canons always change slowly: academia is in this sense a profoundly conservative institution. It also seems that significant changes in objects of study that are not author-centric, such as those proposed by periodical studies, do not register at all in Goldstone’s approach. One may wonder as well whether the cumulative effect of
changes in the way modernism is taught over the past twenty years, including the question of which authors are taught, is only beginning to show up in the subject headings Goldstone tracks. That is, syllabuses on modernism from to the present day have undoubtedly undergone significant revision, and the ranks of future professors may be filled by people who have never read Heart of Darkness without considering Chinua Achebe’s critique, and who are more likely to have read H.D. or Mina Loy than Pound. Dorothy Richardson may never be read as widely as Virginia Woolf, but it’s not hard to imagine a world in which she would be. Most important is that canon revision has never been modernist studies’ exclusive aim. Renovating itself, the field has wished not only to include a greater range of authors and texts but also to move beyond the terms of analysis and modes of understanding promulgated by the authors themselves – whose work, like most modern art, tended to burst on the scene already equipped with a conceptual frame or abstract justification. It could be argued that what has been distinctive about the historicist slant of the new modernist studies is not the “new historicism” pioneered in early modern studies circa but an older-school historicism that values archival work over “pop-up history” and the alchemical transformation of fragments into synecdoches. Even the seemingly abstract concept of “networks,” a touchstone for a great deal of critical work today, becomes visible to retrospective scrutiny only when someone has stirred up dust in archives. All in all, studies of modernism have come a long way since the days when giants roamed the earth bequeathing masterpieces to the future, along with guides to how to read them. While not as new as its advocates would like it to become, the new modernist studies is more diverse with respect to its objects and methods than modernist studies once was, and generally has a more exploratory, interrogative quality than was common prior to the mid-s. How much does it matter that the past twenty years have not ushered in an entirely new phase of modernist studies? By becoming more organized, the field has become more professionalized, and it is inevitable that increased professionalization produces new discussions of what binds a group together. But it is not inevitable that efforts of self-definition be understood as a highly suspect activity – call it “branding” – that transforms objects of professional interest into commodities, where commodification is understood as a process of political neutering, and the rubric under which such objects are studied becomes “merely” a brand, where “brand” is understood as the arbitrary distinction between otherwise indistinguishable entities. What if attempts to circulate conceptual affinities under the name “new modernist studies” is mainly a convenient way to
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attract people with related interests into a space of intellectual (as opposed to exclusively economic) exchange? But Goldstone is not alone in raising a more genuinely radical question: Might criticism be better off abandoning the term “modernism” altogether in favor of a value-neutral designation? For Ross, “the expansion of the field” is such that the term means “precious little any longer, unless it is used as an imprimatur to grant status to something hitherto excluded” (Q). Here “is it really new?” is trumped by the freight of the question “is it really modernist?” Recently, an increasing number of modernists seem eager to shed just this weight by recourse to weak theory. The fact that the special issue on weak theory in Modernism/modernity, edited and introduced by Paul Saint-Amour, has to date generated five rounds of response on Print Plus indicates that his call for a weak definition of modernism – one characterized by “the proximate, the provisional, and the probabilistic” – holds a lot of interest for modernists, some of it hostile, much of it approving (with qualifications, of course), most of it ambivalent. By eschewing strong theory, is modernist studies liberating itself from a prison of conceptual consensus? Or is it merely recapitulating the historical process through which modernism itself was tamed by assimilation into the very culture it once set out to contest? Or have overblown claims for the political value of strong theory blinded critics to the greater political efficacy of small-scale adjustments that may modify the future? The debate may not have legs. No one wants to be mired in definitional squabbles about what counts as “modernist,” but efforts to define need not be viewed as excessively “strong” claims designed to freeze the canon. Reflexive hostility to delimitation relies on an ideal of free play, once a mantra of post-structuralism, in which the subversion of semantic categories is understood as the epitome of freedom; but play itself is impossible to theorize without recourse to that which bounds play. The institutional history of recent modernist studies that this essay has tried to write suggests that if the forum to discuss modernism provided by the MSA and associated professional organizations is to remain a useful space for sharing, continuing efforts of recursive definition must accompany efforts to unravel the edges of the field. Perhaps recursive definition sounds like another iteration of desirable weakness, but I mean to suggest that when a field is vital, it will always include a mix of strong and weak theories, with an openness to loose ties facilitating expansion, even as the counterforce of strong claims drafts new maps. Fields do not require timeless touchstones or sovereign axioms. But methodological rigor and productive exchange will benefit from continuing efforts to specify what we talk about when we talk about modernism.
Notes See Max Brzezinski, “The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?” Minnesota Review (), –, and Martin Puchner, “The New Modernist Studies: A Response,” Minnesota Review (), –. Writing in reply to Brzezinski’s critique of Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), Puchner notes that when his volume was cited as “the most well known and well reviewed book to come out of the movement” (Brzezinski, ), he felt “a bit like Charlie Chaplin, who found himself, in Modern Times, being arrested as the flag bearer of a demonstration into which he had stumbled by accident” (). Brzezinski may have been the first critic to use the acronym “NMS” in print; Puchner implies he had never heard it before, and the acronym is never used in the other targets of Brzezinski’s critique: the anthology Bad Modernisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ) edited by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz and their oft-cited article in PMLA, “The New Modernist Studies,” which appeared in the journal’s “The Changing Profession” section in . A Google search reveals the first entry under “NMS” to be “neuroleptic malignant syndrome,” whose symptoms include sweating, confusion, variable blood pressure, high fever, rigid muscles, and fast heart rate. Of the nineteen MSA presidents through , ten returned a completed questionnaire; of four Modernism/modernity editors queried, two replied; of four acquisitions editors, three replied. Susan Stanford Friedman, “New Modernist Studies,” email to Douglas Mao, . The collection was to include “sections on theory, on transnationalizing the field, and on race/gender/sexuality.” The collection never came together; Friedman’s own contribution, which was to be the opening essay in the volume, was later published as “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/ modernity . (), –. See, for instance, Mark Wollaeger, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –; and Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (London: Bloomsbury, ). I have been unable to track down the fourth speaker, Helen McNeil, or her talk, so her paper title (“Fetish and Fragment in the Modern”) must remain enigmatic for now. DuPlessis soon published an extended version of her argument: “‘HOO, HOO, HOO’: Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Whiteness,” American Literature . (), –, features readings of poetry by Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot, and is framed in part by recent literary work on race, including studies in modernism by Aldon L. Nielsen (Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century []; Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality []) and Michael North (The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and
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Twentieth-Century Literature []). English also published an expanded essay: “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Family Crisis,” American Literature . (), –. This critical move was motivated in part, it seems, by unspoken desires to push back against Houston Baker’s influential claim that the Harlem Renaissance should not be assimilated into existing Anglo-American and European models of modernism. To be clear, Baker wished to reject negative assessments of the Harlem Renaissance based on modernist tenets derived from Anglo-European and Irish modernism; but to the extent that he argued for entirely new histories as the basis of a new account of “Afro-American modernism,” a number of subsequent approaches to race and modernism, such as those by Nielsen and North (see note ), look like counterefforts to produce new histories that embrace white and black modernisms not as entirely distinct phenomena but in relation to one another. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) also inspired modernists to begin thinking about race, and the mid-s saw a number of influential new books that integrated race into a broader discussion of modernism, including Laura Doyle’s Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, ) and George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). To the extent that Lezra’s talk represents early thinking about terrorism that later appeared in his Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: Fordham University Press, ), it too anticipates the historicist and interdisciplinary aspects (here political science) of the new modernist studies. The MSA website once included a history of the organization from which this quotation is taken. The history was drafted by Coyle, edited by McDonald and Laity, and approved by the MSA board in . See “History of the MSA,” Modernist Studies Association, September , , accessed March , , http://mss.press.jhu.edu/about.html., https://web.archive.org/ web//http://msa.press.jhu.edu/about.html, Internet Archive. This history was later condensed and the names of the founders removed. See “About,” Modernist Studies Association, accessed March , , https://msa .press.jhu.edu/about/index.html. Cassandra Laity, “Re: another MSA query,” email to author, . Neither Friedman nor Laity remembers for sure, but Coyle recalls in the same email exchange that “it was Cassandra who first suggested we call the inaugural conference ‘New Modernisms,’ and she in particular was attuned to Susan’s work. The other thing that I remember is that all of us on the first Board immediately agreed to the idea.” See also Rebecca Beasley’s review essay “New ‘Modernisms’”; more confident than Laity or Friedman, Beasley reports that the phrase was “coined” through Friedman’s MLA panels and passed from there to the MSA; Textual Practice . (), –; . “Purpose,” Modernist Studies Association, November , , accessed March , , https://web.archive.org/web//http://msa.press.jhu
.edu/about.html, Internet Archive. Although the wording has not changed, by June the mission statement had shifted from the “About” page to the homepage. Coyle is listed on the MSA homepage as president from to , but in fact he served as president for the organization’s first two years. Scott Heller, “New Life for Modernism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November , , accessed December , , www.chronicle.com/arti cle/New-Life-for-Modernism/; Michael Coyle, email to author, . Heller, “New Life for Modernism.” Gail McDonald, Questionnaire for MSA Presidents. Hereafter all questionnaires will be cited in text as Q. Heller, “New Life for Modernism.” Eight came from Canada, seven from the UK, and one intrepid trio traveled from Australia. Heller, “New Life for Modernism.” Out of forty-six panels, four explicitly addressed race or ethnicity; of twentyone seminars, two focused on race or ethnicity (if a seminar on modernism and postcoloniality is counted). Two significant qualifications are worth mentioning. First, MSA in , “Modernism and Global Media,” was far more diverse than previous conferences. The relative diversity can be attributed to both the call for papers and the host university’s institutional strengths. The CFP solicited work on “transnational and international aesthetic interaction . . . Diaspora . . . media in various colonial and anti-colonial projects, war, global economics, migration, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance . . . music as well as the ways in which global media shapes racial, ethnic, gendered, classed, and regional identities and affiliations.” Organizers also drew on the built-in constituency of Vanderbilt University’s highly ranked program in Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for Latin American Studies. Second, at the “Modernism Today” conference in Amsterdam in , then-president Stephen Ross directly addressed matters of racial inclusion at the annual business luncheon for what likely was the first time in the history of these meetings; people noticed. Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, “Weak Modernism and the Epistemology of Race + Gender,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus . (). Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, annotation to draft of this essay, . Ibid. These include placing increased emphasis on conference themes likely to draw a wider range of participants, asking organizers to develop panel streams and events that work toward this end, and tasking board members to use their professional networks to develop relationships with organizations that would meet the same goal. One such initiative would establish an institutional partnership with the College Language Association, which is deeply rooted in HBCU English departments. I thank Matt Hart, Celia Marshik, Bill Maxwell, and Laura Winkiel for this information. Johnson-Roullier is at work on this issue, which she locates within a broader study of scholars of color and the academy; “Weak Modernism.”
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An exception here is Friedman, who laments what she perceives as “the relative reduction in feminist work in modernist studies” (Q). Seshagiri, “Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis,” Modernism/ modernity Print Plus . (), https://doi.org/./mod.. Anne Fernald, email to author, . Comparable criticism has been directed at various high-profile treatments of modernism, such as Mao and Walkowitz’s “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA . (), –, which makes only passing reference to feminism, and Paul Saint-Amour’s “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” the introduction to a special issue of Modernism/modernity on weak theory, which subordinates feminism to queer theory seemingly because queer theory is more suitable as a paradigm of theoretical “weakness” – Modernism/modernity . (), –; Fernald e-mail. In the inaugural issue, Laity observes, “Feminism/gender rarely serves as a point of entry into the new modernisms, yet critics continue to do important feminist work”: “Editor’s Introduction: Toward Feminist Modernisms,” Feminist Modernist Studies .– (), . The Feminist inter/Modernist Association (FiMA) was founded by Sarah E. Cornish and Julie Vandivere and held its first conference in (https://fimassociation.org). At least according to my manual census of articles in Modernism/modernity from to . A limited spot-check against Victorian Studies suggests that over the same period there was never such a large imbalance as there was in Modernism/modernity. Sean Richardson, Michelle Rada, Patty Argyrides, and Meindert Peters, “Conference Review: MSA ,” Modernist Review, April , , https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com////conference-reviewmsa-/. The review also points to the unusual degree of interdisciplinary work at the conference, which was organized under the theme of “Graphic Modernisms.” The exhibit in question was Object Women: A History of Women in Photography, a digital project published on Instagram in : www.instagram.com/objectwomen. Alex Goody, “BAMS founding?,” email to author, . McDonald consulted with BAMS founders during their early planning stages. Past MSA presidents cite a range of achievements in their completed questionnaires: the constitution and mission statement written by the founders; a significantly revamped constitution and governance structure several years later; the conference seminar structure (adapted from the Shakespeare Society of America); the founding of multiple book prizes; affiliation with the MLA; recasting the editorial structure of Modernism/modernity; the rationalization of the MSA’s accounting practices (at one point early in the century financial information could be found only in a jumble of receipts in a desk drawer); the invention of “What Are You Reading?” sessions; increased funds for graduate student travel and the addition of research travel fellowships; the transformation of the MSA listserv into a genuinely open site to which any member could post (thereby making it possible to free from the list scores of recipients
and organizations who had been arbitrarily added during the early promotional days and who had been begging to be removed for nearly a decade); and the collective vow never again to schedule the annual conference on Yom Kippur (that error having been made twice) or back to back with the annual conference of the American Studies Association. Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg, “Editorial/Introduction,” Modernism/modernity . (), . See Scott Heller, “New Editor Steps into Feud at ‘Modernism/modernity,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, August , , accessed July , , www .chronicle.com/article/New-Editor-Steps-Into-Feud-at/. “About,” M/m, accessed March , , https://modernismmodernity.org/ about. Rainey’s “The Creation of the Avant-Garde,” published in the third number of the journal, provides a revealing case in point: setting aside what were heated contemporary debates about the meaning of the avant-garde stirred up by Peter Bu¨rger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (first English translation ), who identified “modernism” with bourgeois assimilation of the avant-garde’s radical aim of integrating art into the practice of everyday life by abolishing art as an institution, Rainey quietly adopts Marjorie Perloff’s distinction between the symbolist basis of modernism and the collage aesthetic of the avant-garde for the bulk of his discussion of the avant-gardism of Pound and Marinetti – until his concluding paragraph, which draws conclusions not about the avantgarde but about modernism and postmodernism. See Rainey, “The Creation of the Avant-Garde: F. T. Marinetti and Ezra Pound,” Modernism/modernity . (), –; for Perloff, see Rainey’s n. . Astadur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Most prominent among a handful of exceptions are Dada in New York and Futurism qua Vorticism in London. Pre–World War II Europe featured more than sixty avant-garde movements. See Sascha Bru, The European AvantGardes, –: A Portable Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). I thank Sascha Bru for these suggestions. Email to author, . Masja Horn, email to author, . Ibid. Stephen Ross, email to author, . Yet during the course of researching this article I discovered that “modernist” is a term of art in contemporary cuisine: an interdisciplinary group in Bellevue, Washington, is called the Modernist Cuisine team, which comprises scientists and research and development chefs dedicated to “advancing the science of the culinary arts through creativity and experimentation.” See Nathan Myhrvold’s six-volume Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (Bellevue, WA: The Cooking Lab, ). “Modernist Latitudes,” accessed March , , https://cup.columbia.edu/ series/modernist-latitudes.
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Goldstone’s essay, which he plans to update over time before it is published in a journal, is available online in a citable open-access form at Andrew Goldstone, “Modernist Studies without Modernism,” Open Science Framework, doi:./OSF.IO/FRCYS, https://osf.io/wrhj. The quote here is from page . Further references will be cited parenthetically. I thank Goldstone for sending me the link and discussing his article with me. Here I diverge from Brzezinski’s take on “branding” in “The New Modernist Studies” (see note ) as a process that entails, he argues, “the theoretical distortion and political flattening” () of modernism’s utopian potential. I return instead to something like Jennifer Wicke’s more capacious understanding of the term in “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble,” Modernism/modernity . (), –. But while sympathetic to Wicke’s embrace of branding as a relatively benign process that both organizes “a locus for social recognition or attention” and acknowledges the critic’s libidinal investment in a collection of motley yet interrelated objects (), I want to suggest that despite Wicke’s deft account of the reciprocal implication of aesthetic and economic appreciation, “branding” nevertheless too readily lends itself to a facile complaint against the economic (usually understood as neoliberalism) lodged in the name of the political (typically understood as revolution). The relationship between institutions and social change is far messier. Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” .
Horizons
Planetarity’s Edges Modernist Studies and the Bounds of Modernism María del Pilar Blanco
In The Philosophy of History (), G. W. F. Hegel lays out a mappa mundi that affirms the predominance of Europe as much as it turns a geopolitical commentary into a reflection about the planet’s many edges. In Hegel’s thinking, geological formations reflect cultural and historical progression. He writes that “the true theatre of History” is “the temperate zone; or, rather, its northern half, because the earth there presents itself in a continental form, and has a broad breast, as the Greeks say.” The south represents a wholly different situation, as “it divides itself, and runs out into many points.” Thinking about the world in terms of the “Old” and the “New,” he goes on to describe America and Australia as “intrinsically” recent not only in terms of their appearance in the Europeans’ perception of the world, but also “in respect of their entire physical and psychical constitution.” Meanwhile, the “Archipelago between South America and Asia shows a physical immaturity” (). Hegel’s intention is, of course, to trace the development of progress, what he terms Spirit. His focus on cycles of land formation and resulting geological irregularities could also be read as a primitive form of planetary thinking, in the sense that his vision of the earth’s surface reflects for him a northern primacy that continues to come up against the alterity of its opposite. While Hegel concentrates Spirit in the European population, the specter of the future runs through Philosophy of History – a future in which the jagged otherness of that “new” world may reveal its own designs. Hegel’s planet, though sketched in a moment quite different from our own, begins to dramatize the challenge of dealing with cultural and locational difference on a grand scale – a challenge that has remained a vital conundrum to this day. How do individuals reconcile a vision of their sense of the world with multiple, competing visions of otherness? This chapter engages with a disciplinary and institutional history of this question, specifically as it pertains to the new modernist studies. In what follows, I explore the incremental currency of “planetarity” since the
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s in different sectors of the international academy, and particularly in the United States and Latin America, as a way of arriving at the question of how planetarity – particularly as a way of unsettling Eurocentrism and discourses of globalization – sits with, and fits within, the new modernist studies. In thinking about this relationship, I ask how planetary thinking affects our current conceptions of expertise, and indeed our efforts at formulating in-depth arguments about cultural phenomena in different locations, beyond disciplinary boundaries, and across linguistic competencies. My exploration of these issues requires a consideration of other, proximate terminologies that also seek to develop notions of alterity in the study of modernity, such as globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I give most weight to specific cases of scholars who opt for the “planetary” as their theoretical framework, and in particular the case of Susan Stanford Friedman’s proposals for the study of what she calls “planetary modernisms.” As a response, the final section of the essay is devoted to the case of fin-de-siècle Spanish American modernismo. The modernistas and their aesthetic output, I posit, present a particular dilemma for a study of modernism that eschews cultural hubs and stable period boundaries.
Versions of “Planetarity” The “planetary” as an academic paradigm that unhinges discourses of globality has been gaining currency since the late s. Gayatri Spivak launched the term “planetary” into the Anglo-American scholarly conscience in a lecture delivered in Zurich in December . Spivak then expanded that lecture into Death of a Discipline (). In the latter, she proposes we think in terms of the planet in order “to overwrite the globe” and the framework of globalization; for her, the latter entails “the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere,” through which a blindness to alterity is enacted. Instead of continuing with this monolithic model of literary study, Spivak beckons us to “mak[e] home uncanny” () in our development of a future comparative literature. Spivak’s proposal represents an invitation to think of literature well beyond national paradigms and to embrace the planet’s jaggedness rather than adopt an idea of “global” or “worldly” oneness. This sentiment is echoed in subsequent works that envisaged the planet as a challenge for literary scholars in the new millennium. In the introduction to their collection Shades of the Planet (), to name one volume that begins to take on the difficulties of assuming a planetary model of scholarship, Wai Chee Dimock and
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Lawrence Buell contemplate the state of American Studies as a field whose “autonomized chronology” implodes in the face of the planet as temporal and spatial span. The contributions of Spivak, Dimock, and Buell reveal how planetarity poses a disciplinary challenge and, as such, amounts to a conundrum for Anglo-American humanities, organized as they are according to language departments, comparative literature programs, and area studies. Dimock and Buell describe the “elimination of ‘span’ as a scholarly requirement” – a symptom of what they call the “modularity” of American Studies. In their view, this elimination can translate into “a distorting lens in some cases, a fatal pair of blinkers in others” (). For Spivak, meanwhile, planetarity offers an as-yet-undeveloped study model in which “collectivities cross borders under the auspices of a Comparative Literature supplemented by Area Studies” (). Spivak, Dimock, and Buell spell out forms of reading that are, to say the least, difficult to accomplish given our disciplinary realities, ensconced as they are within set period, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. In Spivak’s call for an “uncanny” study of literature, she asks for a renewed understanding of what it is to be human, which means “to be intended for the other” (). This renders planetarity not only a proposal for scholarly reform, but also an ethical proposition that asks for an incorporation of relationality and ecological thinking into our readings of our shared lived space. Such a position is invoked in subsequent proposals for planetary thinking. In The Planetary Turn (), Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru distinguish this framework from globalization by defining the former as “a transcultural phenomenon whose economical and political underpinnings cannot be ignored but whose preeminent thrust is ethical.” Elias and Moraru also find a number of limitations in the new cosmopolitanism’s “chiefly . . . philosophical enterprise”: “[i]t is a kind of knowledge and interpretation of the world, a way one mentally processes environments, assesses them, and endorses attitudes in them” (xxiii). For Elias and Moraru, “planet” and “planetary” are, by contrast, “a noun and an attribute signifying and qualifying, respectively, a multicentric and pluralizing, ‘actually existing’ worldly structure of relatedness critically keyed to non-totalist, non-homogenizing, and anti-hegemonic operations typically and polemically subtended by an eco-logic” (xxiii). The planetary field that Elias and Moraru delineate represents, then, an existential-critical challenge and a form of future-thinking that considers the relation of humans to each other, particularly in this current time of environmental and populational upheaval. While these are evaluations of the planetary as a mode of thinking forward into our precarious futures, the “planetary” has also been invoked
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by non-Anglo-American scholars; the Argentine-Mexican liberation theologian Enrique Dussel is a case in point. In a sustained engagement with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory across the s into the new millennium, Dussel’s vast body of work amounts to an ethical critique of Eurocentrism, from Hegel and Marx to Foucault and Habermas. In an article written in (and translated into English in ), Dussel claims that “two opposing paradigms, the Eurocentric and the planetary, characterize the question of modernity.” (It is important to note here that, while “planetarity” is the translator’s preferred nomenclature in this quote, in the original, Dussel employs the term “un horizonte mundial” – a “global” or “worldwide” horizon – but in the same essay he also employs the term “planetaria” to explain the same phenomenon, making them more or less interchangeable.) While Eurocentrism, according to Dussel, “formulates the phenomenon of modernity as exclusively European, developing in the Middle Ages and later on diffusing itself through the entire world” (), the planetary paradigm perceives European modernity “not [as] an independent, autopoietic, self-referential system,” but as “part of a world-system: in fact, its center” (). Amerindia is the periphery to Europe’s center following the discovery and conquest, and it is this historical development that, according to Dussel, will give Europe “a comparative advantage over the Ottoman-Muslim world, India, and China” (). Perceiving modernity in this light, Dussel claims that “this planetary paradigm is a phenomenon proper to the system of ‘center-periphery’” – of violent inclusion and exclusion – in which Europe administers its central position. Thus, “the management of the centrality of the world-system will allow Europe to transform itself in something like the ‘reflexive consciousness’ . . . of world history” (). In this particular iteration of Dussel’s argument, then, the planetary comes to describe the spread of a system from a set of imperial centers in Europe; at the same time, Dussel reiterates the impossibility of the formation of that thing we call “modernity” without the presence of Europe’s so-called periphery. He therefore rejects the idea that modernity is self-constituted in Europe. “If modernity enters into crisis at the end of the twentieth century, after five centuries of development,” Dussel posits, it has a lot to do with “those moments of a ‘planetary’ description of the phenomenon of modernity,” and not solely with the internal-European crises identified by Weber and Habermas (). After formulating this theory of what he calls the “first modernity,” Dussel has continued to rework his philosophical history of planetarity, further considering, for example, China’s powerful position in the world during the eighteenth century – demonstrating his engagement with the
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work of Andre Gunder Frank in ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (). He has also continued to think about the politics of exclusion and victimhood in this modernity, and has theorized an ethics of alterity in his philosophical project. It is in this aspect that his work converses most fully with Spivak’s future-thinking. In a article, he proposed the term “‘trans’-modernity,” which he defines as “a ‘beyond’ that transcends Western modernity . . . and that will have a creative function of great significance in the twenty-first century.” He puts his faith in human diversity. Moving the discussion into the future, Dussel visualizes a multipolar twenty-first century world, where cultural difference is increasingly affirmed, beyond the homogenizing pretensions of the present capitalist globalization and its supposedly universal culture, and even beyond the postmodern affirmation of difference that finds it difficult to imagine cultural universalities from a millenary tradition outside of Europe and the United States. This “trans”-modernity should adopt the best that the modern technological revolution has to offer – discarding antiecological and exclusively Western aspects – and put it at the service of differentiated valorized worlds, ancient and actualized, with their own traditions and ignored creativity. ()
While such a statement could smack of a celebration of difference (another critical tendency of which critics from Alberto Moreiras to Elias and Moraru are suspicious), Dussel, like other critics discussed in this essay up to this point, is interested in arriving at a theorization of the world’s diversity that critiques and ultimately seeks to overcome the homogenizing discourses of globalization. His past and future thinking offer a continuous dismantling of Eurocentrism from the vantage point of excluded bodies and cultures too often rendered “barbaric” in Western thought. I have described the development of Dussel’s planetary thinking for a number of reasons. A first, and quite obvious, one is that, although well known to Latin Americanists worldwide, Dussel’s work is overlooked in current Anglo-American discussions of planetarity, many of which are coming out of English and Comparative Literature departments. Another reason for his relative absence could be that, for a long time, his work has engaged with the idea of center and periphery, which contemporary critics – particularly within literary studies, as we will continue to see – are trying hard to do away with. At the same time – and this point bears heavily on the new modernist studies – it is important for proponents of planetarity in the Anglo-American academy to engage with critics that do not hail from, or work within, the Global North – in other words, for them to see how that “jagged otherness” that I describe in Hegel’s Philosophy of History
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speaks back. Dussel’s collected work reveals a keen interest in theorizing alterity and historicizing the invention of a mythology about European modernity from the outside.
Planetarity as Practice: How (Not) to Read Otherness There is an essential tension between Dussel’s and Spivak’s work, which leads me back to a discussion of planetarity as a way of reframing how we read literature. Spivak has expressed a strong resistance to applying worldsystems theory – a methodology employed by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, for example – to literary studies. Here, I am particularly interested in how Spivak voices her disagreement in terms of a reading practice. In dialogue with Moretti’s essay “Conjectures on World Literature” (), Spivak questions the formation of a global comparative literature that relies on “the close reading practiced by national literary scholars on the periphery.” Skeptical about producing “authoritative totalizing patterns” produced from the opinions of “small groups of people treated as native informants,” Spivak asks a different and pertinent question: “The others provide information while we know the whole world. Why should the (novel in the) whole world as our object of investigation be the task of every comparativist, who should give up on language learning?” (n). Here, Spivak puts her finger on what I see as an essential question that scholars who espouse the category of planetarity must continue to consider: What would a responsible, ethical planetary reading practice look like, and what would such an expertise demand of us as scholars who want to produce an account of the planet’s diverse populations, languages, and histories? One of the most poignant features of Spivak’s essay on planetarity in Death of a Discipline is an admission about the limits of her own readings. “I keep feeling that there are connections to be made that I cannot make,” she admits, hoping that a “future reader” may get there in the end (). Read in this light, planetarity as a proleptic configuration for criticism is bound within the dimensions of our present condition as scholars whose vision is frustratingly reduced and limited at an institutional level. Indeed, if planetarity represents a future for criticism, our current aspirations to such a model continue to spell out our limitations as readers, as well as the limits to our access to a planetary corpus. This brings to my mind a passage from the collection of essays Not to Read (), by the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, in which he describes the “marvellous and incurable illness that brings us to treasure first editions of bibliographic rarities,” and
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a variation of this affliction in the act of purchasing books that “we’re not going to read,” but that “we wouldn’t know how to read . . . because they are written in languages that are mostly unknown to us.” At the same time, he claims, “it is hard to resist the beauty of an edition of Kawabata in Japanese, for example” (). Zambra, for me, dramatizes a scene of comparative literary intractability, reflecting as he does on how we approach texts from dispersed points across the globe, even those that we are perhaps not equipped enough to read. Extrapolating slightly into our current discussion, I would argue that Zambra’s indecipherable book could represent a symbol for planetary thinking’s current status as a set of scholarly desires, or future-thinking, for literary studies. The wish to read the other’s text can be satisfied, in part, by translations. At the same time, it is important to remember that these are active sites of cultural tensions that require careful unpacking. Each translation carries a trajectory, which itself requires intense scholarly attention. Thinking about translation in the field of modernist studies in particular, Rebecca Beasley has argued that “attention to the translation process across cultures and across national and ethnic languages is vital in order to prevent the grouping of diverse cultural material under the banner of ‘modernism’ from producing a false sense of homogeneity.” She also offers the following warning to the field with which this volume is concerned: “For modernist studies to be actively transformed (not only passively informed) by the global turn, we need to be more persistent in asking questions about translation, dissemination, and reception” (). The difference between a field that is “actively transformed,” as opposed to “passively informed” is valuable to our discussion of planetarity. What would it mean to be an “active” scholar of planetary modernism? The figure of Kawabata Yasunari (–), Zambra’s example of one of his bibliographic pleasures laced with readerly incomprehension, is useful here. As a Kawabata non-expert and as someone who knows very little of Japanese literature from any period, I can immediately research him and see that he is a point in a constellation of authors who have come to be identified under the broad umbrella of international modernism. Kawabata, I read in an essay written by the Japanologist Irena Hayter, was a founding editor of the Bungei jidai (Literary Age) magazine (–) in Japan and the author of the first piece published in the first issue. Here, Kawabata announces the need to “create new literary arts at the same time as creating new life.” This call for newness and the interchangeability of art and life chime, again straight away, with many other modernist calls to “make it new,” from Ezra Pound’s motto to similar calls in the Mexican
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and Argentine avant-gardes of the s, to name just some examples I am quite familiar with. This Asian cipher of newness leads me, then, to Michael North, who argues that a dictum like Pound’s, which is (ironically) an “ancient” one, “stands first on the command line of the modern program because it converts everything into a format that modernity can use.” North’s critique of the “modern program,” with Pound as one of its linchpins, points to a number of assumptions made by past and current scholars of modernism about the time and place of modernity, as well as modernism, where the “new” can be used as a battle cry for a generation of young writers and artists. This assumed location is, of course, the Global North. The brief association I have drawn – of Kawabata and Pound – raises the possibility of thinking of modernism otherwise, of de-centering it in a way that enables us to explore the potential of its cultural and linguistic diversity. It is an exciting prospect. At the same time, however, my knowledge of Kawabata is filtered through translation and through a group of “native informants” that have vouched for his promotion of “the new.” These percolations undoubtedly stand between his work and my ability to read him in the same way that I read the authors whose work I am able to decipher on my own.
Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms and the Shifting Boundaries of Modernism The realization of my own limits as a reader points to a difficulty in thinking about planetarity in tandem with modernism: the recent interest in considering this aesthetic movement or tendency as spatially and even temporally unbounded. This possibility is perceived as a corrective to the commonly held assumption that modernism must be understood, mainly, according to Eurocentric paradigms that would make an Anglo-American author like Pound an example on which the whole movement hinges. The most eminent proponent of a planetary framework for modernist studies is, of course, Susan Stanford Friedman. For quite some time now, Friedman has proposed what she terms “comparativity” as a way forward for the field as a whole. In her Planetary Modernisms (), a culmination of such interventions, she lays down a proposal for an understanding of modernity and a modernism unbounded in both space and time: [M]odernity need no longer reside solely in a specific set of institutional, ideological, or aesthetic characteristics emergent in the post-Renaissance West, radiating globally along the pathways of empire and postcoloniality, and appearing as pale copies of Western genius. Instead, a particularized
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modernity located in space and time could potentially emerge wherever and whenever the winds of radical disruption blew, the conditions of rapid change flared up, or the reflexive consciousness of newness spread – whether these were eagerly sought or resisted, whether imposed from without or developed within.
This proposal, which Friedman avowedly puts out there to “provoke more debate, not close it off” (), radically refigures received histories of art and literature, but it also raises a number of problems that deserve our careful attention. The first issue here is that Friedman equates modernity and modernism with rupture, change, and, as we see above, newness. Thinking back to Michael North’s discussion of the “modern program,” one notices how she is happy to adhere to what is quite a standard definition of European modernism, one that North warns we should nevertheless be wary of. Working on newness and rupture as the ultimate principle of modernity and modernism (not empire, its mythologies, and the debunking of such myths, as Dussel has done), Friedman paradoxically leaves unquestioned a definition of the “modern” that has its roots in an Anglo-American center in the period European and Anglo-American institutions have commonly ascribed to modernism. A second and widely discussed point (for this book has certainly led to quite a rich debate) is the impressive stretching of the category of the “modern” in Friedman’s intervention – a term on which she relies so heavily as a way of setting things right (for cultures and time periods that Eurocentrism has cast to the side or altogether ignored) that it risks stretching itself out beyond recognition. This echoes what Christopher Bush describes as the book’s “relentless suspicion of ‘those who would narrow and fix the meanings of modernity and modernism’” ( in Friedman), which “often seems to suggest that any limitation on the semantic range of either term necessarily shores up Eurocentrism.” The wish to develop a totalizing critique and dismissal of Eurocentrism resonates with more ethical approaches to the idea of planetarity, which we have seen in the work of Dussel and Spivak. (Friedman does not engage with Dussel at all, and only briefly deals with Spivak in the works cited in this essay.) At the same time, however, Friedman’s planet, constituted in a set of diverse readings of texts and objects across time, does not quite bear the mark of what alterity may look like in a world, or parts of the world, that is not necessarily constituted by modernity – and that generates modes of artistic production whose originality is not inevitably made any more critically comprehensible with the aid of those familiar mandates of rupture, fragmentation, or hunger for newness.
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Moreover, and to return to the issues that I have been raising up to now about planetarity as a form of reading, we need to account for the specter raised in Dimock and Buell’s collection, and in Spivak’s Death of a Discipline: the difficulty of offering a breadth of analysis within the constraints imposed by institutional frameworks and the limits of our expertise. This becomes patently clear in Friedman’s text when she enters periods and languages that have not been part of her critical tool kit (e.g., Chinese and vernacular Hindi), in search of what she calls “a creative rupture of conventional forms that accompanies the specific modernities of their time and place.” “Fully aware of the controversies that surround the use of translation,” and cognizant that the “linguistic and cultural/historical knowledge of area studies would no doubt produce much more nuanced and expansively knowledgeable readings,” she proceeds with a reading that relies on “the assistance of critics working in the original,” and which “point her toward the sensibilities and aesthetics of modernist rupture” (). This takes us back to Spivak’s critique of world-systemsinflected literary scholarship: in this case, the reliance on the reading of others to account for the ubiquity of a particular phenomenon across cultures, languages, and periods.
Literary Influence, Linguistic Expertise, and the Routes into and out of Paris: The Case of Spanish American modernismo Spivak turns to several examples from Latin American literature – and particularly Diamela Eltit (Chile) and José Martí (Cuba) – to begin demonstrating what future planetary readings may look like. Martí here is read as a figure who opens up nineteenth-century nationalism into something else: a “ruralist left-humanism” that “giv[es] way not only to a heterogeneous continentalism but also to an internationalism that can, today, shelter planetarity.” Concentrating on Martí’s expansions onto an idea of “our América,” Spivak does not read Martí in terms of movements or periods; instead, she is interested in identifying points of origin for that future ethical reading. I want to move the discussion begun by Spivak to one about periods as a way to continue conversing with Friedman’s own theory of planetarity. For these purposes, then, let us think of Martí as also what Iván Schulman has called one of the originators of “la revolución modernista” in Spanish America – a revolution in which writers experimenting with that new internationalism sought to refresh their reading and writing practices, and even coined the name “modernists” to describe their position as writers in the world.
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Enjoying its heyday from the s till the s, modernismo – a term that its main figure and theorist, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, began employing as early as – represents a first moment of literary cosmopolitanism in post-independence Spanish America. It encompasses the efforts by writers from the region (Martí’s América) to establish a rapprochement with the literary currents flowing through European countries and especially France. This preference meant that modernismo entailed a symbolic break of ties with the former colonial metropolis, Spain, as the one and only literary model available for Spanish American writers. Instead, inspiration for new forms of expression was to be found elsewhere. In this way, modernismo entailed what Manuel Díaz Rodríguez called in an “inverted conquest” – a conquest of Spanish writers by their counterparts in the ex-colonies. In spite of this, modernismo and the body of critical work surrounding it, as Gerard Aching avers, “remain isolated in modernist studies.” As authors from the periphery, the modernistas – keen as they were in reading, translating, and seeking creative inspiration from authors hailing from another, non-Hispanic Europe – have been dismissed for their “afrancesamiento” (Frenchification) since their first appearance on the literary scene. Such a superficial reading may reveal that modernismo stands as the sort of “pale copy of Western genius” dismissed in Friedman’s model “planetary modernism.” In other words, the modernistas’ sense of rupture, the first significant one in postindependence Spanish American letters, could be skipped over by scholars intent on “know[ing] the whole world” (to recall Spivak) because it smacks of Eurocentrism. But this would be too simple a critique, particularly if we consider what this relationship actually entails in terms of reading, translating, and writing processes. To this end, Aching argues that this transatlantic transaction between modernistas and Europe “is graspable . . . not as stark oppositions between center and periphery, modern and premodern, Paris and Spanish America, but as circuits of texts, reading, translation, and literary composition.” In their direct engagement with French letters, Spanish American writers were devising their own literary identities within a changing geopolitical scene. Such correspondences are productive and conducive to momentous innovation, and at the same time, the processes constituted in them also reveal the inequalities and divergent expectations about expertise that were inherent in multicultural encounters at a specific moment in time in which Paris was considered by many intellectuals and artists around the globe as the capital of Western culture. In what remains of this chapter, I take a look at some of the encounters between modernismo and French Décadence in the fin de siècle, as a way to
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offer some final thoughts on the uses of planetarity to date. Within the context of the new modernist studies, Anglo-American modernism has engaged in the study of the continuities with artistic movements that preceded it, particularly decadence and aestheticism. Spanish American modernismo could be read, at least partly, as the reception of and response to French decadent and symbolist attitudes to art, especially in terms of how to construct verse. Modernismo itself is contemporaneous with the development of these movements in Europe. For the modernistas and especially Darío (who eventually relocated to Paris around ), the literary innovations of French decadent and symbolist poets represented a new way forward for Spanish letters. The modernistas paid special attention to how the poets of Décadence employed their own native tongue, partly in order to come closer to the French tradition but also as part of their search for a revivifying of the Spanish language, as well as Spanish metrical forms. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz argues that modernismo signaled a profound observation and critique of the Spanish language by its native speakers in the Americas: “los hispanoamericanos comprendieron que nada personal podía decirse en un lenguaje que había perdido el secreto de la metamorfosis y la sorpresa.” (Spanish Americans understood that nothing personal could be said in a language that had lost the mystery of metamorphosis and surprise.) While Darío only mustered the courage to write a handful of compositions in French, he remains an exceptional example of a poet-scholar breathtakingly attuned to the structures, rhythms, and themes of contemporary French poetry. This is evident not only in his poems, but in his literary criticism as well. One example of the latter is Darío’s “Los colores del estandarte” (The Colors of the Standard Bearer), his response to the Franco-Argentine critic Paul Groussac’s rather damning review of the Nicaraguan’s Los raros (), a book of collected profiles of authors and artists (including Poe, Verlaine, Moréas, and even Max Nordau) that explains Darío’s trajectory and tastes as a reader of contemporary literature. In his review essay, Groussac writes of the untranslatability of French decadent style in the Spanish American context, which was, according to him, too hybrid, too new, and as such incompatible with an aesthetic movement and practice that hinged on something akin to what Henry James called the European “accumulation of history and custom.” Moreover, he attacks Darío on his understanding of French syllabification; but Darío, in “Los colores,” offers a retort that demonstrates his thorough knowledge of historical Spanish and French metric forms. At the same time, he hails a new age of poetic liberty in his own language, given how, in both languages, “puede haber idénticos artífices” (the same artifices can be used).
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Darío’s poetry speaks directly to this belief about the correspondence between French and Spanish. He did not write French verse often, but instead sought out ways to translate and transfigure those “artifices” from the French into his native language. One salient example can be found in his collection Prosas profanas, published the same year as Los raros and considered a high point for modernista poetics. The poem “Canción de carnaval” (Carnival song) begins with a two-verse epigraph from Théodore de Banville’s “Mascarades” (), included in the French poet’s Odes funambulesques (): “Le Carnaval s’amuse! Viens le chanter, ma Muse .. . .” (The rest of the four-line stanza in the Banville poem reads “En suivant au hasard / Le bon Ronsard!,” showing the combination of hexasyllabic lines with a four-syllable foot that will be followed throughout the rest of this long poem.) In Darío’s “Canción,” the epigraph works as an invitation for Darío to step in and continue the poem with his own version of playfully erotic verses. Darío’s poem begins, in turn, with an invitation to his muse to partake of the joyful liberties of carnival life: “Musa, la máscara apresta, / Ensaya un aire jovial / Y goza y ríe en la fiesta / Del carnaval.” Darío’s combination of octosyllabic and pentasyllabic lines comprise a series of appeals to the “muse” to let herself and her body go, little by little, in this feast of the senses; in the second stanza, he asks her to laugh and show her rosy leg – “Ríe en la dansa que gira / Muestra la pierna rosada,” – which echoes Banville’s request to his own muse in the third stanza of “Mascarades”: “Chante ton dithyrambe / En laissant voir ta jambe . . .” (sing your dithyramb, / whilst showing your leg) (). Further correspondences between Banville’s longer poem and Darío’s own include a series of onomastic games. Where, for example, Banville plays with the name of the mid-nineteenth century popular composer Pilodo by rhyming it with the word “cadeau” (gift) in one of his rhyming couplets (“Et dans le bal féerique, / Hurle un rhythme lyrique / Dont tu feras cadeau / À Pilodo!”) (), Darío, in his own composition (with an abab rhyme), performs a similar game, but this time with the name of a famous contemporaneous performer, the English mime Frank Brown, who had relocated to Buenos Aires in : “Únete a la mascarada, / Y mientras muequea un clown / Con la faz pintarrajeada / Como Frank Brown [. . .]”). Popular features of Banville’s Paris meet those present in Darío’s Buenos Aires (where the latter resided in the mid-s) in this game of correspondences, which is in itself set to popular metric forms and rhymes. Darío’s conversation with Banville is a carefully choreographed affair that situates him in the midst of transatlantic literary innovations of his day. In studying Banville, Darío joins such contemporaries as Stéphane Mallarmé,
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who also found lyrical inspiration in this older poet; he too experiments with the reverberating “artifices” shared by two linguistic and poetic traditions that were finding forms of renewal in the fin de siècle. The establishment of intimacy with French literature and culture was, for many modernistas, an intellectual and a physical affair, as a great number of these figures relocated to Paris at the turn of the century. Another important figure within modernismo, but less widely known, is the Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo, who was, at the time of the modernista relocations to Paris, extremely successful as a Parisian. Gómez Carrillo was everywhere, and befriended a number of the main figures of Western European decadence. Gómez Carrillo was, for example, Darío’s first point of contact in Paris when the latter arrived in Paris in for a short stay. There, Gómez Carrillo introduced him to Jean Moréas and led him to a café where he tried to speak to his idol, the poet Paul Verlaine. Verlaine was drunk (as was often the case). When Darío introduced himself as a great admirer, Verlaine replied by slamming his hand on the table and saying, “La gloire! La gloire! M. . . M. . . encore!” Darío never had the opportunity to have an in-depth conversation with his literary hero. Among the great figures associated with Décadence and symbolism, Darío was able to establish a better relationship with Moréas, the author of the Symbolist Manifesto (). When Darío relocated more permanently to Europe, it was again Gómez Carrillo who introduced the Nicaraguan to Oscar Wilde a few months before the latter’s death in . Darío’s Parisian encounters with these figures reveal the internal politics of translation and translatability within the center of French Décadence – that center that was crucial for the development of Spanish American modernismo. Darío writes, in a different part of his autobiography: Me habían dicho que Moreas sabía español. No sabía ni una sola palabra. Ni él, ni Verlaine, aunque anunciaron ambos, en los primeros tiempos de la revista La Plume, que publicarían una tradución [sic] de “La Vida es Sueño” de Calderón de la Barca. Siendo así como Verlaine solía pronunciar, con marcadísimo acento, estos versos de Góngora: “A batallas de amor campo de plumas” [“for battles of love a field of feathers”]; Moreas, con su gran voz sonora, exclamaba “No hay mal que por bien no venga” [“every cloud has a silver lining”] . . . O bien, en cuanto me veía: “Viva don Luis de Góngora y Argote!”, y con el mismo tono, cuando divisaba a Carrillo gritaba “¡Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza!” (–) They’d told me that Moréas could speak Spanish. He couldn’t speak a word of it. Not him, and not Verlaine, though they had both announced in one of the first numbers of La Plume that they would publish a translation of
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“Life Is a Dream” by Calderón de la Barca. With a strong foreign accent, Verlaine used to pronounce Góngora’s verse “A batallas de amor campo de plumas” [“for battles of love a field of feathers”]; and Moréas, with his sonorous voice, would exclaim, “No hay mal que por bien no venga” [“every cloud has a silver lining”] . . . Or, when he saw me, he would say “viva don Luis de Góngora y Argote!”, and when he saw Carrillo, he’d exclaim with the same tone of voice, “Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza!”
Darío concludes this observation by noting that these were the heroes of the Latin Quarter and enjoyed the company of a large, if often mediocre, entourage of disciples. The Nicaraguan notes here, as in other parts of his vast oeuvre, how this relationship of his modernismo and French decadence and symbolism is inequitable. In the passage above, we see how Verlaine and Moréas appear to commit a number of faux pas that hit a nerve with Darío as a representative of the new wave of Hispanic literature in fin-desiècle Paris. Instead of recognizing the individuality of the Spanish American newcomers to Paris, hailed across Spanish America for the way they had reinvigorated Hispanic letters, Verlaine and Moréas jokingly invoke the names and lines of famed figures from the Spanish Golden Age. Unselfconsciously, and to top it off with “strong foreign accents,” they cite the works of those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers when the Spanish Americans approach them and believe themselves capable of translating one of the masterpieces from that bygone period – one that Darío and other modernistas were impressively versed in, as it represented for them a crowning point in the Hispanic tradition they had inherited from Spain. Where Darío’s literary horizons had spread across an ocean in his project to modernize Spanish American letters, he recognized in the French icons of Décadence an unwillingness to move beyond the Iberian Peninsula in their own knowledge and admiration of great Hispanic literature. This led the mouthpiece of modernismo to focus most of his energies on the promotion of Hispanic letters on both sides of the Atlantic. The poems compiled in Cantos de vida y esperanza (), such as “Salutación del optimista” and “A Roosevelt,” reveal a poet in search of affinities rather than dissonances between Spain and its former colonies – this, as the imperial designs of the United States were becoming clearer to Spanish Americans. “. . . [S]i encontráis versos a un presidente,” he writes in his prologue, “es porque son un clamor continental. Mañana podremos ser yanquis (y es lo más probable).” (. . . If you find verses to a president, it is because they are a continental clamor. Tomorrow we may well become Yankees [and this is most likely] .. . .)
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Gómez Carrillo’s trajectory as a Spanish American modernista in Paris took a different turn. He published in Spanish and in French; his articles and chronicles about poetry, contemporary theater, and bohemian life demonstrate his familiarity and ease with the culture of the French capital. His travel writing, moreover, reflects his ever-expanding horizons as a selfprofessed cosmopolitan. Literary histories of modernismo, especially those containing a critique of Eurocentrism, have been unkind to Gómez Carrillo, because he appears to have imbibed Frenchness unreservedly. While Darío’s world was constituted by travels between Spanish America and Western Europe (his fame made him a literary ambassador, if not hero, across Central and South America), Gómez Carrillo appears to have used his footing in France to uncover other senses of the foreign in the age of increased mass travel. His travel writings, for instance – published in the Paris magazine Mundial (–), which Darío edited – detail his journeys to Egypt, Jerusalem, Russia, China, and Japan. These works ultimately earned Gómez Carrillo the French Legion of Honor. As Mariano Siskind explains: “if, on the one hand, he configured his world around a French culture that represented its particularity as always already universal, on the other he also displayed in his readings of global modernisms a wide and decentered world literary network of aesthetic relations.” In an age in which South and Central American eyes were turning to the rise of Japan as a political superpower (particularly in the face of the US threat to Latin America), Gómez Carrillo introduced Spanish-reading audiences to an array of writers from Japan (early writers like Tsuruyuki and Hikomaro, but also contemporary ones, such as Kikuchi Yūhō), broadening the scope of world literature and translation well beyond the goalposts set up by Darío. We could say that, if Darío’s coordinates are fixed as a line that extends from Spanish America to Western Europe, Gómez Carrillo quite clearly re-orientates modernismo beyond Paris: he uses Paris as a point from which to continue looking further eastward for cultural, literary, and political models with which to relate. These varying coordinates of the two authors are visible in Darío’s prologue to Gómez Carrillo’s collected travel essays, De Marsella a Tokio: sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón (From Marseilles to Tokyo: Sensations from Egypt, India, China, and Japan), published in . Darío, in the prologue, presents himself as the friend who listens to the returning traveler’s adventures abroad, perceiving in these a form of poetry: “Es usted impresionable é incansable. Es usted curioso y deseoso; y hemos quedado convenidos [sic] en que sin escribir versos, es usted un poeta.” (You are impressionable and tireless. You possess curiosity and
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desires; and we are convinced that, even if you do not write verses, you are nevertheless a poet.) The question of colonialism – those encounters of traditional societies with new bureaucracies, financial systems, and modern forms of labor – lies at the heart of many of Gómez Carrillo’s travel narratives. In his portrayal of the port city of Yokohama in Japan, to take just one example of many, he writes: Es un puerto cosmopolita, y no una ciudad japonesa. Su arquitectura es la misma de Amsterdam y del Havre. Su vida es de negocio y no de placer.. . . Aquél que parece un teatro es el depósito de los petróleos de la Compañía Standart [sic] de Nueva York; el otro, muy grande, muy blanco, que se enseñorea en un inmenso espacio vacío y que los extranjeros toman por Casa Consistorial, es la Specie Bank; el de más allá, tan noble de aspecto con sus fachadas Renacimiento, es la agencia de los vapores alemanes; el de enfrente, algo bajo, pero muy vasto, que parece un circo ó un teatro popular, es el despacho de la Compañía Nipón Yusen Kaisa [sic]. (–) It is a cosmopolitan port and not a Japanese city. Its architecture is the same as Amsterdam’s or the Havre’s. Its life is that of business and not of pleasure. . . . That building there that looks like a theater is the New York Standard Oil Company’s depot; the other, very large and white building towering over its vast, empty surroundings and which foreigners take to be the City Council offices, is the [Yokohama] Specie Bank; the one further down, so noble with its Renaissance façade, houses the offices for a German steamboat company; the one across from it, quite low-lying but vast and which looks like a circus or popular theater, houses the offices of the Nipon Yusen Kaisha shipping company.
Gómez Carrillo’s modernista poetics extend this movement’s cosmopolitan aspirations into locations that break open the transatlantic correspondences first established by Darío. Written in a period that witnessed the expansion of old and new empires, Gómez Carrillo’s writings raise questions about imperial capitalism’s reach, its effect on the preservation and promotion of culture and local aesthetics, and the lessons that so-called peripherical communities in one part of the globe can learn from distant, yet connected others. If nothing else, his and Darío’s contributions to world literature define modernity in terms of a series of (re)orientations, or shifting cultural and aesthetic observations that enable a better understanding of the geopolitical events unfolding throughout the fin de siècle. Paris acts as a complex working center, in and through which modernistas worked out their aesthetic methods and literary theories and ultimately recalibrated their relationship to Europe as well as their understanding of a wider world. However, their gravitation toward Paris should not be
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dismissed as uncomplicated Eurocentrism, or as a reification of the periphery by the powerful center. Instead, the movements I have outlined here – of subjects, languages, literary styles, and even of travel – reveal an ongoing, multilocational modernism through which the diverse possibilities and the multiple intractabilities of cultural translation are played out. I would like to finish with a brief reprise of Darío’s memory of the encounters with his French counterparts in Paris, which should give us reason to pause now. Amid such scenes of jocularity, there is also a grave impasse: the Europeans are and appear to remain uninterested in seeing the newly arrived Spanish American as their counterpart, as an assiduous reader of their work, or as an innovator in his own region and language. But they themselves claimed to know the Hispanic literary tradition, asserting an expertise that was glaringly out of sync with Darío’s own knowledge of French literature. Darío’s comparativism, encompassing so many different practices and transactions, is different from the practice of his Latin Quarter interlocutors, who remind me of those readers in Spivak’s critique who, in the contemporary scene, feel they have a right to “know the whole world.” The imbalance and incompatibility evident in Darío’s Paris dealings continues to represent a challenge to planetary thinking and planetary reading, particularly as it develops within current Anglo-American contexts. Despite its reparative intentions, this will to planetarity runs the danger of becoming a palliative, unrigorous form of critique if it is intent on dismissing certain core formations and periods. Critical approaches that mobilize planetarity will always have to contend with complex and evolving transactions between diverse cultural actors; thus, these approaches will always confront the limits of competency and selection as they produce new literary cartographies of comparison. In light of these challenges, modern and contemporary Anglo-American deployments of planetarity must remain alert to the risk of reading the “world” through the interpretive and translational filters provided by institutions of the Global North.
Notes G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, ), . For a reading of Hegel’s reading of the Global South, see Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures),” boundary . (Fall ), –. The lecture was “Imperatives to Re-imagine the Planet,” and was presented on December , , at the Sifttung-Dialogik in Zurich. See Spivak, “‘Planetarity’ (Box , WELT),” Paragraph . (), –, .
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Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, “Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –, . Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, “Introduction: The Planetary Condition,” in The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ), xi–xxxvii; xii. This introductory essay offers a useful survey of the uses of “planetarity” in different academic quarters. Enrique Dussel, “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity,” tr. Eduardo Mendieta, in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, . Enrique Dussel, “Europa, mundialidad y Eurocentrismo,” in La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas, ed. Edgardo Landfer (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, ), –, , . See Enrique Dussel, “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” tr. Alessandro Fornazzari, Nepantla: Views from the South . (), –. Dussel, “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity,” . Spivak, Death of a Discipline, n. Alejandro Zambra, “Traveling with Books,” in Not to Read, tr. Megan McDowell (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, ), –, . I offer a brief commentary on this idea in “Chine ,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus . (August , ), https://doi.org/./mod.. Rebecca Beasley, “Modernism’s Translations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, . Irena Hayter, “Figures of the Visual: Japanese Modernism, Technology, Vitalism,” positions . (May ), –, . Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . See Susan Stanford Friedman, “World Modernisms, World Literature, and Comparativity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Christopher Bush, review of Planetary Modernisms, by Susan Stanford Friedman, Modernism/modernity . (September ), –, . See also Bruce Robbins’s review/discussion of Planetary Modernisms, Interventions . (), –. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, . Spivak, Death of a Discipline, .
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Iván Schulman, “Modernismo/modernidad: teoría y poiesis,” in Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana, vol. II, ed. Luis Íñigo Madrigal (Madrid: Cátedra, ), . See Alejandro Mejías-López, The Inverted Conquest: The Myth of Modernity and the Transatlantic Onset of Modernism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, ). Gerard Aching, “The Temporalities of Modernity in Spanish American Modernismo: Darío’s Bourgeois King,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, . Friedman’s engagement with Latin American literary and cultural developments in Planetary Modernisms extends to brief discussions of Walter Mignolo, Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (), and the “modernist magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez” (), but there is no mention of modernismo. One reason for this could be the relative lack of good translations of modernista texts into English. Aching, “The Temporalities of Modernity,” . See, for example, Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Octavio Paz, “El caracol y la sirena,” Revista de la Universidad de México (December ), –, . Paul Groussac, “Boletín Bibliográfico: Los raros, por Rubén Darío,” La Biblioteca . (November ), –. Darío’s response, “Los colores del estandarte,” was published in La Nación newspaper in Buenos Aires, on November , , . Henry James, Hawthorne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Rubén Darío, “Los colores del estandarte,” . Théodore de Banville, “Mascarades,” in Odes funambulesques (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, ), –, . A rough translation of this is “Muse, with mask ready, / Put on a jovial air / And enjoy and laugh in the celebration / of the carnival.” Darío, Prosas profanas (Paris: Librería de la V. de C. Bouret, ), –. “Come join the masquerade / And while a clown frowns / with his painted face / like Frank Brown . . ..” Rubén Darío, Autobiografía (Madrid: Mundo Latino, ), . Darío, Autobiografía, . Rubén Darío, preface to Cantos de vida y esperanza (Madrid: Mundo Latino, ), –, . Translated text taken from Darío, Songs of Life and Hope, tr. Will Derusha and Alberto Acereda (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), , . Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ), . In El porvenir de la América Latina/The Future of Latin America (Valencia: Sempere, ), , for example, Argentine Manuel Ugarte (–) writes: “Si el Japón entra en las combinaciones de nuestra política
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internacional y si la diplomacia latinoamericana debe contar con él desde ahora, es porque la hostilidad entre esa nación y los Estados Unidos puede ser utilizada con éxito en un momento dado.” (If Japan becomes a player within our international politics and if Latin American diplomacy should count on this participation from now, it is because the hostilities between that nation and the United States can be used in our favor in future.) Enrique Gómez Carrillo, De Marsella a Tokio: sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón (Paris: Casa Editorial Garnier Hermanos, ), x.
Religion’s Configurations Modernism, Empire, Comparison Susan Stanford Friedman
“God is dead,” the madman proclaims in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, echoed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the waning days of Victoria’s reign. The famous pronouncement appears in hindsight to have predicted the revolutionary mood of early twentieth-century avant-gardes in Europe and the subsequent disillusionments of the generation that lived through the devastations of World War I. The religion that underlay European history appeared bankrupt, no longer providing the solace, moral order, and certainty of civilizational superiority in relation to the rest of the world. As Pericles Lewis notes in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, church attendance in Europe was in significant decline. The rise of science and rationalism rooted in the Enlightenment supported the spread of secularism and gave increasing legitimacy to atheism. Karl Marx’s designation of religion as the opiate of the masses, Sigmund Freud’s declaration of religion as an illusion, Weber’s economic reading of the Protestant Reformation, Emile Durkheim’s sociological dissection of religion, James Frazer’s comparative mythology of religions – all reduced the authority of Christianity in particular as the singular truth and source of moral certitude. Writers and artists turned elsewhere for inspiration and meaning, often finding in the aesthetic itself the framework that established religion no longer seemed to provide. The field of modernist studies, with its initial and continuing emphasis on the modernism of early twentieth-century Europe and America, has mirrored the “death of God” and decline in religion that characterized the period under study. Religion has been largely ignored in modernist studies, even as the “new modernist studies” has greatly expanded the spatiotemporal boundaries and the archive of modes, genres, media, creators, and thinkers of plural and planetary modernisms. There are important exceptions, of course, particularly for examination of the appeal of religion in its non-Western or occult forms. Gauri Viswanathan has linked the declining legitimacy of established Christianity to the spreading influence
Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
of occultism, particularly in theosophy, a connection linked to British rule in India. Lewis theorizes provocatively that the rise of agnosticism and even atheism among prominent Victorians like Matthew Arnold and Leslie Stephen produced a countermovement in the modernist novel, with a continuing rejection of institutionalized religion but a substitution of various kinds of spiritual experience that are essentially religious in nature: Joyce’s epiphanies; Woolf’s moments of being; Proust’s luminous memories; Kafka’s inaccessible mystery. Lewis’s book is one of the very few to attempt a broad characterization of the place of religion in modernist writers, as they engaged with the philosophical, sociological, psychological, and anthropological theories of the period. Amardeep Singh’s ambitious Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction examines the interface of religion, secularism, nationalism, and colonialism in a transnational range of writers, including George Eliot, Joyce, Tagore, V. S. Naipul, Rushdie, and Philip Roth. W. David Soud’s Divine Cartographies: God, History, and Poesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot examines the poetics of a God-centered theology in the wake of historical trauma. Anthony Domestico’s Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period focuses on the philosophically rich Christian theologies embedded in the poetry of Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Jones. Lara Vetter’s Modernist Writing and ReligioScientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer challenges the notion that science replaced religion in early twentieth-century modernism by exploring the discourses of religion and science as they borrowed from each other. Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality, edited by Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Watson, identifies the importance of gender in the formation of spiritualities outside established religion. Suzanne Hobson’s Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics, – establishes the pervasive recourse to discourse about angels in modernism. Most considerations of religion and modernism, however, focus on the specifics of individual or small clusters of writers working in Europe and America in the first half of the twentieth century. T. S. Eliot’s use of Jessie Weston or Vedic/Buddhist texts in The Waste Land, his conversion to Anglicanism in , and the religiously informed work that followed have been the object of significant study. Joyce’s wrestling with Catholicism; W. B. Yeats’s involvement with Madame Blavatsky’s theosophical movement and creation of his idiosyncratic occult system; H.D.’s immersion in mysticism, hermetic tradition, and occult practices; D. H. Lawrence’s biblical influences and attraction to non-Western primitivism;
Zora Neale Hurston’s initiation into voodoo in Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica and her biblical rewriting in Moses, Man of the Mountain; Auden’s conversion to Catholicism and subsequent poetry – all these (and others) have been the focus of important work in modernist studies. But in spite of significant study of religion in selected writers, there has been little broadly synthetic work about the place of religion in modernist studies. Modernism – at least in early twentieth-century Europe – has seemed predominantly secular. Criticism is by nature retrospective, all the more so for the study of movements like modernism that have largely been named and studied after the fact. This doubled temporality – the time under inspection; the time of retrospection – means that any literary history of a phenomenon like modernism (or modernisms) will reflect perspectives of criticism’s present moment. The very term “the new modernist studies” attests to how every present is a part of a flow that reconstitutes itself out of changing needs and perspectives. With this principle in mind, I suggest that we reexamine past modernisms through the lens of religion, especially given the centrality of religion to twenty-first-century globalism and its discontents. To do so is not to be anachronistic; rather, it is to recognize that concerns of the present can bring into focus aspects of the past that have been ignored or misunderstood and can now be usefully revisited for new insights about both then and now. In this essay, I only begin such a task by briefly mapping some relevant current debates in religious studies, proposing a transnational comparative methodology, and demonstrating this methodology with comparative readings of religion in two pairs of texts: Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora () and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (); and Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years () in the context of her iconic unveiling at the Cairo train station in and H.D.’s unveiling sequence in The Flowering of the Rod, the third volume of her Trilogy (–), in relation to her visit to Egypt in the same year.
Contemporary Religious Studies The new modernist studies is vibrantly interdisciplinary; in suggesting a more systematic integration of religion into modernist studies, I urge a parallel interdisciplinarity, one that requires some familiarity with cuttingedge debates in religious studies. Such an approach can supplement the already growing body of criticism on religion in individual writers, artists, and thinkers. Just what is meant by “religion” is vigorously debated in
Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
religious studies, as are the various methodologies used to study it. The growth of comparative world religions as a field has led many to question the efficacy of the category of religion itself. For some, religion is a concept spawned in the wake of European colonialism, invented to underline the superiority of Western civilization. The very comparison of Christianity to other world religions reflects a lens that understands and assesses other religions within a Western framework that ensures misrecognition and an implicit hierarchy. For others, the study of religion unconsciously reflects a Protestant bias, with an emphasis on personal belief or faith and a retreat from understanding religion in civil or theocratic society. However, these forms of critique are countered vigorously by those who recognize that religion as a concept takes form only in the particular, and that differences among world religions abound. Rather than attempt a single definition of religion, these scholars engage with a wide range of symbolic systems and cultural practices that involve some concept of the supernatural and/or spiritual – however understood and engaged with. Still others broaden the concept of religion to include systems of thought that inspire belief and conviction without notions of divinity – for example, Marxism. Differing concepts of religion in turn produce differing methodologies of study. The theological or philosophical approach is frequently text centered, focused on the evolving ideas and debates within given religions or across different religions as these are registered in sacred or scholarly texts. The institutional approach, common to both historians and sociologists, examines the organizational structures of power within the religion and religion in relation to the state, civil society, the family, and the individual. The ethnographic approach, developed in cultural anthropology–based in fieldwork, focuses more heavily on differing practices in sects, religions, or comparative religions – for example, the rituals of everyday religious life that might include prayer, offerings, initiations, festivals, pilgrimages, art, music, performance, and communal expression at such moments as birth, circumcision, menses, marriage, and death. Of course, whatever the emphasis, there is some crossover in these methodologies, as well as use of other fields. Integrated with these approaches are often questions of tolerance and intolerance, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, peace and violence, social justice and injustice. Of particular importance to modernist studies, views about what has come to be called the “secularization narrative” have shifted considerably in the twentieth century. According to this narrative, the rise of science, rationalism, and secular democracies in Europe and the United States has produced the decline of religion and the spread of secularism. Sociological
studies on falling church attendance appear to confirm the retreat of religion from the public sphere into the realm of private belief. According to the narrative, modernity – forged first in the West – goes hand in hand with secularism. The more modern a society, the more secular it is; the more traditional a society, the more religious it is. However pervasive this narrative remains in mainstream culture – it underlies fear of Islam in the West and fear of the West in parts of the Muslim world – the secularization narrative has been thoroughly debunked in religious studies for a variety of reasons, including its failure to recognize the ongoing importance of religion in all parts of the world in the twenty-first century. Some now propose “postsecularism” as an alternative to the secularization narrative; the term, however, is vigorously debated and holds different, often incompatible, meanings. For some, postsecularism alludes to the return of religion as a major player on the twenty-first-century global stage. For others, postsecularism is a term of critique not only of the secularization narrative but also of the return-argument as a form of contemporary Islamophobia. For still others, postsecularism entails a turn to the rising forms and practices of spirituality outside the established religions. In its prevailing assumption of modernity’s secularization of the early twentieth century, modernist studies lags behind these current debates in religious studies on the historical and contemporary entanglements and politics of religion and secularism.
Religion in Comparative Modernisms For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on the early twentieth century, when the secularization narrative was taking shape through the work of such thinkers as Weber and Durkheim and when the appeal of organized religion appeared to be in decline, especially among the avant-garde artists, writers, and thinkers of the period. I agree with Lewis’s view that many modernist writers in Europe at this time turned to alternative forms of spirituality, outside the institutional structures of Christianity or Judaism. But I would like to suggest a broader methodology, one informed by the global significance of religion in the twenty-first century; one that is comparative on a transcontinental stage; and one that takes into account the variety of methodologies in contemporary religious studies. By comparative, I want to move beyond seeing how writers like Eliot use Sanskrit or Buddhist texts in The Waste Land, or D. H. Lawrence figures “primitive” African statues in Women in Love or Aztec religion in The Plumed Serpent. Instead, I advocate following the example of Amardeep Singh by
Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
juxtaposing writers from different parts of the world who emerged out of different religious cultures in the context of larger social and political conditions – preeminently the colonialisms and anti-colonial movements of the early twentieth century. The comparative approach I suggest for the early twentieth century encourages direct engagement with questions of how religion figures into the workings of empire and the anti-colonial movements it spawned. It assumes the agency of writers from different parts of the world – not as sites of absolute difference but as writers aware of and participating in the global flows of culture, including religious cultures. It examines how this intercultural exchange inevitably takes place in the context of British, European, and American colonialisms; as such, it must deal with the inequities of imperial power, the history of European “civilizing” missions, and the anti-colonial movements for liberation. A comparative methodology for studying religion in modernisms of the early twentieth century draws heavily upon postcolonial studies, including feminist analyses of the gendered dimensions of colonial relations.
Gora and A Passage to India “What is the connection between country and religion?” Tagore asks in his novel Gora, the same question that Joyce asks in the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. Both Gora and A Passage to India represent India at the beginning of the twentieth century as a site of turbulent colonial modernity in which religion plays a defining role, especially in their prescient envisioning of India’s postcolonial future. Gora, published in Bangla in , appearing in English translation in , is a novel of ideas about Hinduism and anti-colonial nationalism wedded to the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot in the context of elite Bengali family life. A Passage to India, published in , sets a realist travel narrative about colonial racism, injustice, and cross-racial, erotically charged friendships within a heavily symbolic three-part framework based on religion: “Mosque”; “Caves”; “Temple.” In formal terms, each novel is a hybrid energized by the writers’ exploration of religion’s meaning for colonial relations and anticolonial aspirations. In thematic terms, each novel acknowledges what Tagore regards as the excessive sectarianism of India’s religions (including Christianity) but promotes a vision of a tolerant, multi-religious society as essential for India’s emergence as a modern, independent nation-state. In this sense, both novels exhibit a utopianism unfulfilled in the light of the murderous sectarianism of Partition in – and the rise of militant
fundamentalisms tied to nationalism in all the major religions of the twenty-first century. Significantly, religiously defined conflict over the nature, seclusion, and education of women and over the meanings of inborn racial/caste identity serves as harbinger – the canary in the mine, so to speak – of future pathways, signaling on the one hand a utopian religious tolerance and on the other hand a dystopian religious sectarianism. As a novel of ideas, Gora features many lengthy (somewhat stilted) dialogues about the “real” nature of India, including centrally the significance of religion in its theological, institutional, and practicing forms. Gora argues eloquently for one side: Hinduism, he says, is fundamental to Bharat, the Bangla term for the transcendent spiritual, cultural, and political dimensions of the nation colonized but yearning for freedom. Indians, Gora claims, should reject the colonialist view of many educated Bengalis that Britain epitomizes the modern, the enlightened, and the model to be imitated. The anti-colonial struggle requires reverence for Hinduism, a devotion not centered in belief but rather expressed through strict obedience to the orthodox rules of caste, purity, pollution, and the seclusion of women. Gora’s concept of the nation’s spirit as orthodox Hinduism is epitomized in the opening chapters, when he refuses to eat with his Brahmin mother because she allows a Christian to prepare her food and when he rejects visiting their new Brahmo neighbors because it would require contact with their educated daughters. Two characters argue just as eloquently for the opposite view: Gora’s mother Anandamoyi, a Brahmin; and Poresh, a member of the Brahmo sect. Both represent an idealized, tolerant, faith-based religion, one rooted in a nonorthodox Hinduism, the other in a nonsectarian version of Brahmoism; one in female form echoing the all-loving, nurturing figure of Mother India; one in male form embodying the meditative and learned seeker of wisdom. The postcolonial India they envision is multi-religious, not imitative of the British but rather open to all religions and freed from the divisive practices of caste and gender seclusion. For them, religion based in belief, prayer, reflection, and tolerance is the basis of the coming modernity and the new nation to come, free from British rule. In setting up Anandamoyi and Poresh as static ideals – mother and father figures of the emergent nation – Tagore attacks the tendency of all religions to produce their own communal orthodoxies and sectarianism. He himself grew up in a Brahmo household, with his father an important spiritual leader of the movement. Founded in the early nineteenth century, Brahmoism developed among elite Bengali Brahmins and blended aspects
Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
of Hinduism with other religions, especially Christianity and Islam, and advocated modern reforms of caste and gender. But the novel critiques dogmatic Brahmoism, paralleling the sectarianism of the Brahmo community with that of the orthodox Hindus. Tagore also criticizes the elitist tendency of the Brahmos to ape the ways of the British rulers and disdain the Hindu masses. It’s worth noting here that secularism has no place in Tagore’s anti-colonial ideal. Indeed, the novel argues that a “right” approach toward religion is essential for the emergent postcolonial nation. To navigate between the rigid orthodoxies of both Hinduism and Brahmoism, Tagore relies on a complex double marriage plot made difficult because both orthodox Hindus and Brahmos forbid intermarriage. Introduced as opinionated and rigid, Gora must come to understand the false, oppressive, and potentially dangerous link between orthodox Hinduism and India/Bharat. Gora’s transformation is bound up with his aspirations to resist British rule and promote a freed nation based in Hindu orthodoxy. As Gora unwillingly falls in love with the forward-thinking Brahmo Sucharita, he flees the city, claiming to want to see the “real” Hinduism of ignorant villagers as the basis for his anti-colonial activism. Finding himself embroiled in a local conflict between the imperial police and oppressed Muslims, Gora defends the Muslims and defiantly accepts the jail sentence imposed by the British magistrate. Forced in prison to eat food touched by non-Brahmins, Gora believes he has been polluted and agrees to a penance ceremony to restore his purity so that he can lead a nationalist/Hindu movement. Gora’s orthodox Hindu nationalism falls apart in the novel’s sudden denouement when Gora discovers what the reader has long known: he is not a Brahmin. With a nod to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Gora learns that he is the son of an Irish soldier and an Indian mother who died during the Sepoy Rebellion. As both mixed race and mixed religion, Gora realizes the limitations of his earlier Hindu-based anti-colonial nationalism. His marriage to Sucharita carries important allegorical weight. It signifies Tagore’s position in this novel of ideas: a single religion, based particularly on a racial, gendered orthodoxy, should not form the foundation of the postcolonial nation. India should be a multi-religious, not a Hindu, nation, one that opens doors for women and allows intermarriage. The novel concludes with Gora’s return to the father/ mother figures of Poresh and Anandamoyi. To Poresh, he says, “Teach me the mantra of that deity who belongs to all – Hindu, Musalman, Khrishtan, Brahmo – the doors of whose temple are never closed to any person of any caste or race – the deity not only of Hindus but of Bharatvarsha” (). To Anandamoyi, he says, “Ma, you are my only mother. The
mother for whom I have looked everywhere . . .. You have no caste, you do not discriminate against people, you do not hate – you are the image of benediction. You are my Bharatvarsha” (). Curiously, A Passage to India arrives at a similar endpoint, though through radically different means, a similarity all the more striking in the context of Tagore’s own heterodox religiosity and Forster’s avowed atheism. Gora’s fixation on the meaning of the “real” India recurs as motif in the English woman Adela Quested’s desire to see the “real India,” a desire that sets in motion the trip to the caves, her accusation of assault in the caves by her host Dr. Aziz, the trial and acquittal of Aziz, and the provisional reconciliation between Aziz and the Englishman Fielding that projects possible friendship into the postcolonial future: the famous swerving of the horses at novel’s end, along with the phrase, “No, not yet . . . No, not there” (). Where Gora seeks the real India in the Hindu masses, only to find it in India’s Muslim villagers, his own biraciality, and his union with a non-Hindu, Adela’s quest is both sign and symptom of colonial rule, in spite of her disgust at the more overt forms of British racism. As Aziz reflects, “This pose of ‘seeing India’ which had seduced him to Miss Quested at Chandrapore was only a form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it” (). In spite of thus distancing himself from the desire to see the “real” India, Forster’s symbolic structure for A Passage to India represents his view of the real India as heterogeneous, especially in its complex interweaving of different religions. The novel’s three captioned parts each invoke a key religious sensibility that contributes to the multifaceted whole of India: Islam in “Mosque”; Jainism or Buddhism in “Caves” (a matter of some debate); and Hinduism in “Temple.” Woven into the realist plot of British racism is a narrative center in each part that points toward a religiously inspired, near-mystical communion that momentarily transcends the colonial divide and thus offers some hope for the distant and presumably postcolonial future. In “Mosque,” Aziz and Mrs. Moore (Adela’s prospective mother-in-law) meet in the moonlit serenity of a mosque’s architecturally harmonious inner courtyard, where they form a powerful, near-spiritual bond initiated by Mrs. Moore’s respectful removal of her shoes and criticism of British racism. In “Caves,” the presence of a wordless mystery, one beyond all distinctions of good and evil, spirit and body, divine and human, out-oftime and in-time, constitutes the setting in which the best of the British Raj, Mrs. Moore and Adela, become unhinged: Mrs. Moore, to lose her Christian faith and capacity for ethical agency; and Adela, to
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imagine a cross-racial sexual assault, both with dire consequences, given the colonial context. In “Temple,” the annual Hindu festival reenacting the birth and playful youth of Krishna in Gokul produces revelatory moments in which religion becomes “a living force to the Hindus,” a “temporary” state of mind in which divisions disappear and “all men loved each other” (). “The fissures in the Indian soil are infinite,” the narrator reflects: “Hinduism, so solid from a distance, is riven into sects and clans, which radiate and join, and change their names according to the aspect from which they are approached” (). But the magical moment of midnight, when Krishna’s birth is reenacted, unites those fissures temporarily and ushers in the joyful reenactments of Krishna’s youth, ending with the mystical laughter of people smearing their faces with buttermilk and Godbole’s ecstatic song “Come, come, come, come” (). This Hindu festival, narrated in considerable ethnographic detail, becomes the occasion for a partial and momentary reconciliation between Fielding and Aziz, between colonized and colonizer – not one that can be actualized into a tangible and ongoing friendship (“No, not yet . . . No, not there” []), but at least one that allows them to renew their past fondness for each other. The “Temple” section bears a closer look in terms of Forster’s representation of religion in the context of India as a nation-to-come, a future he accepted as inevitable, though not immediate. First, by using Hinduism as the umbrella for the novel’s climax and denouement, Forster signals his awareness that Hinduism is India’s dominant religion, however riven by divisions it might be. Second, Forster folds into this Hindu dominance the significant presence of Islam within India, represented metonymically by Aziz being the main center of consciousness in “Temple” and by his reunion with Fielding taking place at the deserted Moghul fort, with its ruins of a small mosque and shrine to a Sufi saint at which local Hindus and Muslims worship in the spirit of Akbar, the third Moghul ruler known for his religious tolerance. Later, out upon the floodwaters of the lake, Mrs. Moore’s son Ralph has a vision of a floating king, Forster here weaving together spiritual undertones of Krishna, Christ, and Allah that prefigure the provisional reconciliation between Aziz and Fielding. The “Temple” section allegorizes an India in which “the air was thick with religion and rain” (), where religion is not a single doctrine or practice, but rather the interwoven strands of the inner mysteries of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. What Gora and A Passage to India share comes into focus if we put religion at the center of inquiry about novels that represent India’s colonial
past so differently. Both Tagore and Forster write against the narratives linking the nation-state to one particular religious identity, narratives prevalent in the early twentieth century and still very much with us today. Where they diverge in their treatment of religion is on the aspect of religion they emphasize. Tagore is preoccupied with religion as it is practiced and institutionalized in orthodox Hinduism. He especially regards its rules about contact, pollution, and purity as elements that threaten to divide the anti-colonial movement. While Tagore’s poetry and music explore the spiritual dimensions of religion, his novel (like his prose in general) focuses on the political implications of its practice in the nation and the family. Forster also represents significant aspects of religious practice, especially in Islam’s mosque and purdah rules and Hindu festival customs that he renders ethnographically, but the novel as a whole emphasizes a communal religious mysticism as an alternative to religious orthodoxy, a spirituality that takes distinctive forms in Islam, Jainism (or Buddhism), and Hinduism. Less concerned with the nationalist project, Forster’s novel treats religion in experiential terms, with implications for theologies that embrace diversity. Centrally concerned with the anti-colonial project, Tagore’s novel espouses an embrace of India’s multi-religious population without much concern for religion’s personally experiential or spiritual dimension.
Huda Shaarawi and H.D. Religion permeates the lives and work of Huda Shaarawi, the Egyptian feminist and anti-colonial nationalist, and H.D., the American poet who lived most of her life in Britain and Switzerland, but very differently from each other and from Tagore and Forster. The two women never met and most likely did not know of each other, but the juxtaposition of events related to the religious practice of the veil in would figure importantly in their lives and work in significantly distinctive ways. Some form of veiling has long been a part of all three Abrahamic religious practices. For Europeans, the Muslim veil largely functioned as a signifier of the exotic East, based in Orientalist fantasies of hidden, even forbidden, sexualities embodied especially in the Arab bodies of seductive harem women. In the Middle East and South Asia, some form of the veil was a widespread cultural custom practiced by all religious groups, typically signifying the requirements of female modesty, especially in the company of men outside the family. For Muslims in particular, the veil marked a religious obligation justified by three much-debated and
Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
ambiguous passages in the Qur’an, ensuring the purity of women’s bodies as the signifier of family honor. According to many Muslim feminists, veiling developed as a clerically mandated cultural practice based in the concept of the female body as fitna, a word that complexly invokes chaos, disorder, and temptation. Exposed outside the family, a woman’s body is fitna, potentially seducing men into sin and dishonoring her family. In the early twentieth century, anti-colonial movements often began campaigns to unveil women, remove the barriers of seclusion, and open the doors to women’s education and entrance into the public sphere as essential components of the new modernities advocated in places like Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and India. In these contexts, unveiling women marked a gendered emergence into a postcolonial modernity. In , H.D. traveled to Egypt, visiting Alexandria, Cairo, Luxor, and Karnak from January through February , about a year after her visit to the bazaars, mosques, and Byzantine arts of Istanbul. H.D.’s fascination with the Egypt she visited centered mostly on ancient Egypt, especially the Isis/Osiris religion of death and rebirth. But her visits to the mosques, Coptic churches, and bazaars of Cairo and travels down the Nile must have given her the sights, sounds, and smells of modern Egypt. She could not have missed seeing upper-class Egyptian women in their face veils and the generally covered nature of dress among most Egyptian women – Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. Although the importance of this visit to Egypt permeates much of H.D.’s later work, the unveiling sequence in The Flowering of the Rod is my focus here. In March , just after H.D. left Egypt, Huda Shaarawi, one of Egypt’s leading anti-colonist–feminist activists, founded the Egyptian Feminist Union and then in May led an Egyptian delegation to the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance Congress meeting in Rome. Upon her return to Cairo on May , she removed her face veil at the train station, never to wear it again. This act, and the photos of her face that she allowed a leading Egyptian newspaper to print, caused a sensation across the Middle East and is still remembered today as a transformative performance that crystallized the modernizing feminism of elite anticolonial activists. This unveiling helped to initiate an end to face veiling, harem life, and the seclusion of women in Egypt. But it was not Shaarawi’s first, or her most important, political act. In , she had defied the practices of seclusion by leading a parade of veiled women through the streets of Cairo to protest British rule. Born in to a wealthy Egyptian landowner and politician and a young Turko-Circassian woman who
became one of his consorts, Shaarawi started her activist work in the s, and she remained a formative leader until her death in . Shaarawi’s memoir, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, tells the story of her wide-ranging activism on behalf of the education, economic welfare, and family status of girls and women alongside her important role as an Egyptian national and a pan-Arab anti-colonialist. Unfinished and unpublished in her lifetime, Shaarawi’s memoirs begin with her childhood and end in , becoming increasingly fragmentary after and thus barely narrating the scene of unveiling at the Cairo train station. Instead, she focuses on life in the harem of a wealthy and influential family, narrating her struggles to get a rigorous education; her refusal to live with her husband after she was married at age thirteen against her will; the complications of her Circassian/Egyptian family with ties to both Turkish and Arab cultures, including Christian and Muslim members; her friendships with European, Egyptian, and Turkish women breaking free of gender constraints; and her determination to enter the political arena on behalf of girls, women, the poor, and the nationalist cause. Her resentment of the family’s favoritism of her brother, her hunger for education, and her distress around marriage generated far more intense pain than the veil, which she hardly mentions. At first, she writes, “I withdrew into myself and resented those around me. I began to spend afternoons in the garden . . . amid the birds, fish, and pet animals. I referred the companionship of these creatures to the humans who had injured my self-esteem” (). The story of her memoir is the tale of how this withdrawal turns into an active engagement in a public world she was determined to change, how she moves from tear-filled periods when “my heart was broken” (), when “I wept for my lost childhood and freedom” () to her formation in of the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women and a life of intensifying political organizing. Harem Years is wide ranging in its feminist analysis and activism, in no sense focused on the veil as the key oppression of women in the Middle East, as so many in the West have assumed. The modernity Shaarawi espouses is explicitly feminist, nationalist, anti-colonialist, and increasingly pan-Arab, and by the s, impatient with the limitations of European feminism. Unveiling was nonetheless important to early twentieth-century Egyptian feminists like Shaarawi because it symbolized their insistence on joining the public sphere in Egypt’s revolution and contributing to its efforts to establish a modern postcolonial state, with an educated population and citizens of different genders and classes holding economic, familial, and political rights. For them, unveiling their faces was neither
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an anti-Islamic nor a secular act. Shaarawi remained devoutly Muslim, and appeared variously with hair covered and uncovered. The Islam she alludes to in Harem Years is a cosmopolitan one open to good relations with a wide array of Christians – Coptic, European, Armenian, Orthodox – as a photo of the anti-colonial demonstration shows, with its still-veiled women carrying flags with crosses and crescents sewn together in solidarity (). “The British claimed our national movement was a revolt of the Muslim majority against religious minorities,” she writes. “This slander aroused the anger of the Copts and other religious groups. Egyptians showed their solidarity by meeting together in mosques, churches, and synagogues. Shaikhs walked arm in arm with priests and rabbis” (). As an act asserting her modernity, unveiling was fully compatible with anticolonialism and religious tolerance for Shaarawi and her fellow feminists. Where Shaarawi’s feminist unveiling aims not at the Qur’an but at religious practice and the institutions that support veiling, H.D.’s revelatory unveiling scene in The Flowering of the Rod poses a feminist challenge to Christian theology by reformulating New Testament stories as revelations of the divine in female form. The poet’s quest in the poem is primarily theological, seeking “resurrection” as a “sense of direction” that leaves behind “the-place-of-the-skull,” established in the first volume of Trilogy as the devastating bombings of London in a world at war (, ). She finds this imagined paradise in “the tale of a jar or jars” that blends the stories of the New Testament Marys: Mary of Bethany, who refuses to help her sister Martha in the kitchen and later bathes the feet of Jesus with myrrh from an alabaster jar; Mary of Magdala, or Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who is the first to see the risen Christ; and Mary the mother of Jesus. In H.D.’s retelling, these Marys morph into each other, symbolically encompassing three aspects of womanhood: mind or spirituality; sexuality; and procreativity. The “tale of jars” is oddly anachronistic, narrating a confrontation between Mary of Bethany and an “Arab,” “a master of caravans” in the marketplace (, ). The scene jumbles times and places, juxtaposing the modern Egypt H.D. witnessed with the biblical world of Jesus. There are no “Arabs” in the English Bible, and the setting is ambiguously modern, “a little booth of a house // set to the left, back of the market” (). The “uncanny bargain” Mary strikes echoes the modern bazaars H.D. visited as well as ancient markets (). As the sequence unfolds, the Arab morphs into Kaspar, one of the three wise men from the East, and then, as “some say,” into a Magician, a Chaldean, or even “not an Arab at all,” but possibly Abraham or even God himself (–). As “a great
wanderer, / a renowned traveler” through time and space, he is surely one of H.D.’s questing personae (). The Arab merchant has something “priceless” that Mary of Bethany wants – an alabaster jar of myrrh. But in the poem’s tale of a jar, he refuses to sell it to her, shows her the door, and is shocked when “the unmaidenly woman did not take the hint. . . / had not sidled gracefully / at a gesture of implied dismissal / . . . out the door” (). In refusing to leave, Mary allows her scarf to slip to the floor. The worldly merchant, “who had known many women” (), is offended: “it was unseemly that a woman / appear disordered, disheveled; // it was unseemly that a woman / appear at all” (). What especially disturbs him is Mary’s “hair – un-maidenly – // It was hardly decent of her to stand there, / unveiled, in the house of a stranger” (). Unveiled, Mary is sexualized, representing chaos, temptation, fitna, and the refusal of women to be confined to the private space of the harem. Instead, unveiled, Mary takes her place in public, literally in the space of the market: not as a prostitute whose sexuality is for sale, but as a woman who combines an unveiled mind, spirit, and body in the figure of the three Marys. Unveiled, Mary’s hair also becomes the site of religious revelation. As the Arab merchant picks up her scarf, he “sees” the “islands of the Blest, . . . the lost centre-island Atlantis” () in her hair: an epiphany of salvation, a mystical experience whose imagery blends Christian, Greek, Kabbalist, and Egyptian imagery. He saw “the fleck of light / a grain, a flaw, or a speck of light, . . . was the whole secret of the mystery;” literally, as his hand just did-not touch her hand, and as she drew the scarf toward her, the speck, fleck, grain or seed opened like a flower. ()
“Sir,” Mary tells him defiantly, “I have no need, not of bread nor of wine, / nor of anything you can offer me, // and demurely, she knotted her scarf / and turned to unfasten the door” (). Mary’s reveiling becomes an act of defiance that refuses what will become the central sacrament of Christianity: the eucharist, consuming bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. The Flowering of the Rod ends with Kaspar kneeling before Mary to give her the unbroken jar of myrrh. Instead of the Christchild, however, she holds a fragrant bundle of myrrh in her arms (), recalling Trilogy’s earlier, alchemical fusing of the bitter words marah and mar, which in the crucible of war “change and alter / mer, mere, mèr,
Religion’s Configurations: Modernism, Empire, Comparison
mater, Maia, Mary, // Star of the Sea, / Mother” (Trilogy ). Kaspar’s gift of the jar recognizes Mary not as the mother of God, but as God the mother. The ecstatic unveiling of Mary’s hair in The Flowering of the Rod counterpoints Shaarawi’s political unveiling of her face in the Cairo train station. But as different as they are, these unveilings return us to the meanings of women’s bodies in the interlocking realms of the symbolic, political, and religious. Both unseemly unveilings center on women’s refusal to accept the condescending dismissals of men and men’s rebuffs of women’s desire for the spirit and the mind as well as sexuality and maternity. But their unveilings also differ. In H.D.’s text, the unveiling of Mary provides a mystical counterpoint to modern war; for Shaarawi, unveiling is the symbolic act that calls for a wide-ranging political modernity for women and colonial subjects. These unveilings reveal the distinctive but interlinked modernity of which each writer was a part. For H.D., it is the modernity of a violently imploding Europe, spiritually in need of a religious vision H.D. locates in a reimagined biblical world and female divine tinged with the anachronisms of the modern Middle East. For Shaarawi, it is the modernity in which feminism and anti-colonialism converge as necessary to each other and consistent with a reform-minded, cosmopolitan Islam.
Conclusion For these two pairs of writers – Tagore/Forster and Shaarawi/H.D. – the secularization narrative does little to explain the different but powerful presence of religion in their works. Not simply an expression of Eurocentric colonialism, religion in its different forms is a key arena in which Tagore and Shaarawi think through the modernities they advocate for their colonized nations and gender. Each recognizes ways in which orthodox theology, clerical authority, and institutionalized forms of religion can impede the anti-colonial and feminist modernity they advocate; each envisions a cosmopolitan form of religion that embraces religious diversity. Both Forster and H.D., alienated from the institutionalized Christianity of the West and seeking alternative religious modes they locate in colonized spaces, envision mystical revelations that substitute for what they see as the bankrupt spirituality in the established churches. For Forster, the Muslim mosque and the Hindu festival foster mystical communion across difference. (The caves are a more complex religious site.) For H.D., an imaginary Arab marketplace enables the momentary unveiling of divinity.
For Forster and H.D., religion is the occasion for cosmopolitan and gender-crossing epiphany; for Tagore and Shaarawi, religion is part of the politics of anti-colonialism and feminism. These examples of comparative analysis illustrate the importance of transnational frames of reference for thinking through how religion might infuse any given modernity, including colonial modernities and their related modernisms. Certainly, studies of religion in the work of individual writers and artists will remain significant, but a more broadly synthetic engagement with religion in modernist studies is nonetheless much needed. Not all such comparative studies must be transnational; certainly, there is a place for the study of modernism in more geographically focused times and places. But a comparative methodology attuned to the debates in religious studies about world religions, imperial power, and appropriate methodologies is important. Too often, the modernities that lie at the heart of all modernisms are assumed to be a rupture from traditions that quintessentially include religion, an assumption that too easily plays into imperial discourses. To be modern – and modernist – is too often thought to mean being secular, or at most vaguely spiritual or hermetic. But reading backward from our standpoints in the twenty-first century, when religion is anything but dead on the world stage, we are primed to ask a range of new questions about the meanings of religion and secularism for modernist studies, questions that take into account old and new forms of imperial and gendered power and resistance.
Notes Friedrich Nietszche, The Portable Nietszche, ed. and tr. William Kaufmann (London: Penguin, ), , . Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. See, for influential theoretical approaches to religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Daniel L. Pals, Eight Theories of Religion, nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, ). Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Amardeep Singh, Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in TwentiethCentury Fiction (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, ); W. David Soud, Divine Cartographies: God, History, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Anthony Domestico, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); Lara Vetter, Modernist Writing and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, );
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Suzanne Hobson, Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics, – (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ); Elizabeth Anderson, Andrew Radford, and Heather Walton, Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). On the occult and science, see also Mark S. Morrisson, Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) and Vetter, Modernist Writings. For recent examples, in addition to books already cited, on Eliot see Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T. S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, ); Cleo McNelly Kearns, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Tudor Balinisteanu, Religion and Aesthetic Experience in Joyce and Yeats (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). On Yeats, see Matthew Gibson and Neil Minn, eds., Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, ). On Joyce, see Roy K. Gottfried, Joyce’s Misbelief (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, ); Colum Power, James Joyce’s Catholic Categories (Belmont, NC: Wiseblood Rooks, ); Marilyn Reizbaum, James Joyce’s Judaic Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). On Lawrence, see Luke Ferretter, The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence’s Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, ); T. R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). On H.D., see Matthew Robinson, The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, ); Elizabeth Anderson, H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, ); Vetter, Modernist Writings. On Hurston, see Carla Kaplan, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Anchor, ); Nancy Ann Watanabe, African Heartbeat: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Dynamics (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, ). On Auden, see Arthur Kirsch, Auden and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). On not fearing anachronism, see Amelia Groom, “This Is So Contemporary,” in Time: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Amelia Groom (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), –. Rabindranath Tagore, Gora, tr. Sujit Mukherjee (; New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, ); E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (; New York: Harvest, ); H.D., The Flowering of the Rod, in Trilogy, ed. Aliko Barnstone (; New York: New Directions, ); Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, tr. Margot Badran (New York: Feminist Press, ). Further citations to these works will be given parenthetically in the main text. Harem Years was unfinished; Margot Badran, noted historian of Egyptian feminism, assembled, translated, and introduced the volume. Hereafter, references will be identified in the text. Useful resources include Susan M. Felch, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), and the journals Religion and Literature and Cultural and Religious Theory.
For recent critiques of the category “religion” and comparative world religions, see, for example, David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Markus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, eds., Secularism and Religion-Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). See recent theories of and/or defenses of the category of religion, for example, Elizabeth Castelli, ed., Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ); Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terror: Thinking about Religion after September (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Craig Martin, Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (New York: Routledge, ); Ivan Strenski, ed., Thinking about Religion: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, ); Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, ); Manuel A. Vásquez, More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). For recent examples of theological and/or text-based approaches, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ); Dressler and Mandair, Secularism and Religion-Making. For theories of religion as practice, see David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a Theory of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Tweed, Crossing and Dressing; Vásquez, More Than Belief. For institutional approaches, see Melissa Wilcox, ed., Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues, Sociological Perspectives (London: Routledge, ). For critiques of the secularization narrative, see Asad, Formations; Michael W. Kaufman, “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies,” New Literary History . (Autumn ), –; Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Gauri Viswanathan, “Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy,” PMLA . (March ), –. On postsecularism, see, for example, Michael Allen, ed., “Reading Secularism: Religion, Literature, Aesthetics,” special issue, Comparative Literature . (); Russell A. Berman, ed., “Are We Postsecular?,” special issue, Telos (Summer ); Aamir R. Mufti, ed., “Antinomies of the Postsecular,” special issue, boundary . (); Janet R. Jacobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Secularisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); Manay Ratti, The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature (London: Routledge, ). For discussion of Gora in the context of the Brahmo movement, anti-colonial Indian politics, and Tagore’s essays on nationalism, see Singh, Literary Secularism, –.
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For discussion of Forster’s interest in Indian religions, see Antony Copley, A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writing of Edward Carpenter, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood (Oxford: Lexington Books, ), –. For a discussion of the complexities of Muslim veiling, including recent reveiling movements, see Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ); Rafia Zakaria, Veil (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, ). See H.D., “Autobiographical Notes,” unpublished MSS, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, –. See also Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi, Casting Off the Veil: The Life of Huda Shaarawi, Egypt’s First Feminist (London: I. B. Tauris, ). Early twentieth-century unveiling movements in the Middle East focused on the face veil, not on covering the hair (Badran, Feminists). H.D. significantly alters this focus by centering the unveiling on Mary’s hair.
Disability’s Disruptions Embodiment and the New Modernist Studies Maren Linett
The new modernist studies has begun to be enriched by its contact with disability studies, an interdisciplinary field that contests the medical model of disability, insists on contextualizing and historicizing physical and mental disability, and unpacks and destabilizes the cultural constructions of normalcy and difference. As Paul Saint-Amour elaborates in his introduction to the recent special issue of Modernism/modernity on “weak theory,” disability studies is one of a group of theoretical approaches that “prompt[s] us to revisit . . . the gendered politics of yielding and force,” that invites us to “leave off theorizing weakness as a failure, absence, or function of strength and instead to theorize from weakness as a condition endowed with traits and possibilities of its own.” In this essay, after providing an overview of modernist disability studies, I use three prone modernist bodies to explore some of the ways weakness, illness, madness, and disability suggest such a revisitation – within the texts and for readers – of the politics of force or strength. In Bodies of Modernism (), I proposed that the modernist approach to representing disability mixes a sense of strangeness with a sense of identification. This combination became conceivable, even probable, in the modernist period because in the wake of Darwin and Freud, writers became willing to entertain the idea that radical otherness – the mad, the ill, the deformed, even the animal – lies within the self. Such a collapse of the boundary between the self and the other resulted in texts that lend themselves to theorizing weakness and theorizing from weakness – to understanding that authors’ representations of abject bodies and conditions are not separable from their self-representations or their reflexive conceptions of modernism. The dynamic of disability othering and identification visible in modernist literature parallels a racist dynamic within Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (). The text’s suggestion that the “heart of darkness” is located in the distant Congo – even as it sees this “darkness” also in the imperial
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self – is intertwined with an ableist dynamic that locates the same “darkness” in Kurtz’s physical and mental incapacity. Blackness and disability become tightly intertwined, together serving as a metaphoric vehicle for what is wrong, simultaneously, with Africa and with Belgian imperialism. Marlow’s memory of Kurtz after the latter’s death stresses not only his weakness and immobility, but also his continuing power: Marlow envisions Kurtz “on the stretcher opening his mouth voraciously as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind.” The mysterious potency that Kurtz’s ill body possesses finds a loose parallel in representations of bodily immobility in two texts by the Irish modernist Elizabeth Bowen. In Bowen’s novel, The House in Paris, Madame Fisher exerts uncanny power over the other characters from her long-term sickbed; and in her wartime short story “Look at All Those Roses” (), the paralyzed teenager Josephine Mather casts a sort of liberatory spell over the nondisabled narrator. In The House in Paris, disability is connected to power in that Mme Fisher exhausts herself physically, attains to stillness, through exercising her mental power. In “Roses,” in an approximate reversal of the former text, power accrues to Josephine’s disabled body by virtue of her stillness, her storing up of “self” – a substance diluted in those with more mobility. “People who stay still,” Bowen writes in that story, “generate power.” The prone and potent bodies of Kurtz, Mme Fisher, and Josephine blur the distinction between active and passive, their strength inseparable from their weakness. Disability in these texts is able to infect the self of the “normate,” replacing the oppositions of self and other, normate and abject, with characteristically modernist ambiguity and instability. By highlighting the ways the prone bodies of these characters collapse such distinctions, this essay sheds light on the ambivalence folded within modernism’s embrace of the active and the fit. It demonstrates a hesitation within the modernist desire, as Woolf puts it in The Years, to “live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave”; modernism displays a desire too for weakness, for withdrawal, for the kind of mental privacy that can sometimes be fostered by madness, illness, and disability.
Modernist Disability Studies Jonathan Hsy notes that literary disability studies “invites readers to consider how every human body is enmeshed in – and transforms with – the physical and social conditions of a particular environment.” The “particular environment” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in western Europe and the United States, as variable as it was in different locations and decades, shared some features relevant to how human bodies were understood: greatly increased immigration of unfamiliar groups; dramatic changes in gender relations during and after the Great War; the influence of psychoanalysis; the establishment of sexology; intense surveillance of atypical bodies and behaviors; a eugenic mind-set and widespread eugenic measures. Modernist disability studies engages with this particular historical context, building on the work of historians and theorists of immigration, race, gender, class, and sexuality to understand how disability interacted with those categories. Modernist disability studies has, that is, both a strong historical and a strong intersectional bent. Historical, cultural, and literary texts that relate closely to modernist disability studies include Lennard Davis’s Enforcing Normalcy and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies, the works that effectively invented literary disability studies; Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory, the first sustained look at disability studies through the lens of queer studies, where the concept of compulsory ablebodiedness is introduced; Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell’s Cultural Locations of Disability, Nirmala Erevelles’s Disability and Difference in a Global Context, and Eunjung Kim’s Curative Violence, all of which connect disability studies with global studies; Kim Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States, which helped bring disability history into the mainstream; Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, which entwines disability studies with gender studies; and Douglas Baynton’s Defectives in the Land and Jay Dolmage’s Disabled upon Arrival, both of which explore the ways disability has been formative in immigration history. These contextualizations of disability, immigration, sexuality, gender, race, and imperialism have fostered intersectional work in the new modernist studies. Some examples can be found in inquiries into queer/crip interventions into genre by Joseph Valente and Courtney Andree; into interrelations among race, class, sexuality, and disability by Matt Franks, Todd Carmody, Ann Fox, and Jess Waggoner; and into “the eugenic Atlantic” and the biopolitics of disability by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder. Attentive to the special focus of eugenicists on the category of the “feebleminded,” scholarship on cognitive disabilities explores the ways modernist literature was informed by newly sweeping incarcerations of mentally disabled people and the rise of the mind sciences. Work on modernism’s use of “idiocy” by Janet Lyon, Joseph Valente, Rebecah Pulsifer, Courtney Andree, and Michael Bérubé and work on autistic
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poetics by Claire Barber-Stetson and Julia Rodas make up a vital subset of modernist disability studies. These scholars interrogate the role of cognitive disability in modernist production and consider, in the words of Bérubé’s subtitle to The Secret Life of Stories, “how understanding intellectual disability transforms the way we read.” As Bérubé’s subtitle suggests, these scholars engage also with metadiscursive questions, exploring the relationship of disability to modernist reception and aesthetics. Given modernist literature’s emphasis on form, on making form new – or as it was sometimes described, as I discuss in Bodies of Modernism, on deforming the novel – modernist disability studies takes on formal aspects of literature, exploring the ways bodies and texts can be metaphorically aligned in the presence or even in the absence of disability. Tobin Siebers’s Disability Aesthetics has been foundational to this strand of modernist disability studies. Siebers explores the ways modernism and bodily anomaly were linked by both modernists and antimodernists (for example, Nazis, who valued in art the same type of bodies they valued in life); this linkage, Siebers explains, resulted in associations between the eugenically fit body and kitsch, and between the disabled body and modernist art. A recent example of a formal approach is Rebecca Sanchez’s Deafening Modernism, which reads an array of American modernist texts without deaf characters as illuminated by the aesthetics of American Sign Language and Deaf culture. Ato Quayson’s Aesthetic Nervousness and James Berger’s The Disarticulate take up a range of formal and theoretical questions, including the roles of language and silence in modern and postmodern narrative. Michael Davidson’s work, which includes his Concerto for the Left Hand and Invalid Modernism, explores modernist aesthetics alongside issues of disability, sexuality, and race. As is evident from these brief descriptions, much of the best work in disability studies incorporates both formal and intersectional inquiry. Although studies of the body emerging from gender studies have been transformative in humanistic study, they at first often understood “the body” as, by default, the nondisabled body. Centering disability reminds us that much as whiteness and masculinity must be interrogated, so must ideas about the “normal” body. As Simi Linton writes, “centering the disabled position . . . focuses attention on both the structure of knowledge and the structure of society.” As the subfield moves further into the mainstream of modernist literary studies, disability studies will continue to explore the ways the category of disability informs and is informed by race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, religion, migration, and imperialism; it will continue its formal inquiry into disability aesthetics, including in texts in
which disabled characters are absent; and it will more fully express its affinities with animal studies, environmental humanities, and bioethics.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness Since Chinua Achebe’s landmark article, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” most critics acknowledge that although Heart of Darkness scathingly critiques Belgian imperialism, it maintains a deeply racist outlook. One of the ways it does so is by using the Congo as a metaphoric vehicle for the corruption of the brutal European project (a complex literary version of blaming the victim). Achebe writes, “Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality.” But as Achebe points out, “it is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship.” Conrad represents the “darkness” of Africa as a corruption also to be found in the European self. Such corruption is found especially in the European who has “gone native,” fallen prey to the “sickness” and “madness” represented by the landscape of the Congo and its inhabitants – the ill and disabled Kurtz. The European self is most maddened, sick, and disabled when in contact with “darkest Africa.” It is not generally commented upon, however, that the text supports its racism with ableism by turning madness and illness into joint metaphors for depravity. Critics have failed to remark the political implications of this use of mental and physical disability both because the text so thoroughly turns madness and illness into metaphors and because the medical model, the dominant way western culture has understood disability from the midnineteenth century to the present, depoliticizes and decontextualizes illness and disability. Disability as a political category has therefore, until recently, been invisible to most literary critics. A disability studies approach to Heart of Darkness not only brings the political valence of the text’s use of madness and illness to the fore, but also reveals a sense in which the text’s use of Kurtz’s mad, ill body to represent imperialism naturalizes imperialism as a weakness to which any human body – or body politic – might succumb. The novella repeatedly uses disability and madness to depict both the Congolese and the imperialist project. To give just a few examples: when Marlow describes reacting to the “frenzy” of the Congolese “as sane men would [react to] an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse” (), he displaces European confusion onto the minds of the inhabitants, who are now read as mad. Imperialism itself is described as a form of madness leading to
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physical illness. When Marlow sees a French ship shelling an empty shore, he asserts that “there was a touch of insanity in the proceeding” (), and when he suspects he will be drawn in by this mad project, he relates it to physical debility: “I foresaw that . . . I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” (). He describes the atmosphere of the Central Station as containing “a taint of imbecile rapacity” (). Disability emerges in points of contact between the European and the African continents; madness and imbecility develop out of the mismatch of what the text understands as the civilized and the primitive. The realization that the African is, in Joycean terms, “my more than brother” is affectively contradictory in ways similar to the othering and identification of disability found in modernism. In both cases, there is an acceptance of the other as akin to oneself, which can work in liberatory ways; but at the core of that acceptance is a more or less horrified (depending on the author) realization that the deformed, the corrupt, the mad, and the primitive are buried within oneself. The fear sparked by this relationship – the “suspicion of their not being inhuman” that “thrilled you” () – is the source of the power attributed to Kurtz, who straddles European and African identities. Having “gone native,” he embodies this thrilling kinship. Through its recurring imagery of “forgotten . . . instincts,” the text draws upon then-dominant discourses of race science and eugenics, using a temporal schema to relate madness and disability to race: the more ancient a figure or element is assumed to be, the blacker, madder, and more imbecilic it must also be. Although Europeans are “remote from the night of first ages,” they can still feel “the faintest trace of a response” to the “wild and passionate uproar” – the madness – that Marlow sees in the unnamed African peoples he encounters (). Such temporal thinking, typical of late nineteenth-century science and anthropology, relegates both blackness and madness to the precivilized past. As Baynton explains, “both nonwhite ‘lower’ races and defective individuals were similarly described as evolutionary laggards or throwbacks.” The anxieties about racial kinship that permeate Heart of Darkness also encompass kinship with the mad, ill, disabled figure Kurtz represents when he finally enters the text on his stretcher. During Marlow’s journey, he hears from various people how extraordinary Kurtz is. Repeating these assertions, Marlow builds up readers’ expectations of “an exceptional man” (), “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress” (), a “universal genius” (). Marlow’s growing
concern with and loyalty to Kurtz suggest that it is all the more striking – tragic even – that such a man has been corrupted by contact with Africa. A strong theoretical approach to this text, then, might read Kurtz as a mythic figure who is ultimately exposed as weak, and might read the text as building up a myth (understood variously) only to deflate it, to question, perhaps, totalizing thinking itself. But a weak theoretical approach might focus on the ways Kurtz’s weak body, unstable mind, and haunting voice are co-constitutive, and on the ways imperialism’s force thinly veils a weakness that fears the kinship of the other. Kurtz’s stretcher appears before he himself is visible, highlighting his illness and prone state. Soon Marlow sees “the man on the stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm.” While physically ill, Kurtz commands a mass of people. Through his binoculars, Marlow sees “the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks” (). This description ties powerlessness (the thin arm, the bony head, the grotesque jerks) to power (the shining eyes, the moving jaw with its persuasive oratory, the commanding arm). Exemplifying the paradoxically weak power of imperialism just described, Kurtz’s command is uncanny; he has a “weirdly voracious aspect as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him” (). Further, he is both sane and mad – “I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear. . .. But his soul was mad” (). These oppositional qualities – powerlessness and power, madness and sanity – are brought together in a way that parallels the conjunction of Kurtz’s native and European identities. Racial difference and disability both bestow a thrilling vigor by revealing the other integrated within the self. After his encounter with Kurtz, as if he had caught his illness, Marlow becomes very sick, “wrestl[ing] with death” in “the most unexciting contest you can imagine” (). He describes his illness as “a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things – even of the pain itself” (). This illness, along with his later lie to Kurtz’s Intended, demonstrates the powerful contagion of the corruption and “sickness” of “darkest Africa.” Kurtz’s illness and madness, which have their sources in the Congo, threaten to infect Marlow and, by extension, European culture. This dynamic depends not only on readers accepting the racist depiction of Africa as the source of illness and madness, but also on their accepting the ableist depiction of illness and madness as corruption, as natural symbols of imperialism’s exploitation. The final image of the novel, the “tranquil waterway leading
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to the uttermost ends of the earth . . . seem[ing] to lead into the heart of an immense darkness,” emphasizes the flow of Europeans into Africa, while also hinting at a return flow of ill health and madness into the European continent. This contagion is not one in which the infecting agent transmits the disease passively; the case is more complicated. Kurtz’s power depends on wresting his “moral victory” from the very conditions of illness and madness that surround and encompass him. Marlow comments that after his own illness, he “understood better the meaning of [Kurtz’s] stare that could not see the flame of the candle but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness” (). Kurtz’s metaphoric blindness here confirms that disability is one of the conditions of his voracious power. The conjunction of madness and illness that animates him is a danger for the European self but also an element whose incorporation destabilizes – and thereby reinvigorates – the imperial center and its emissaries. The myth of Kurtz, then, isn’t so much deflated as highlighted as myth – a story whose power persists even after it is revealed to be, like Kurtz, “hollow at the core” (), or, like the heads Kurtz has placed on his fenceposts, “not ornamental but symbolic” (). Kurtz’s prone, mortal body emblematizes, and therefore naturalizes, the interconnected weakness and power that Conrad sees as structuring imperialism.
Bowen’s House in Paris Like Kurtz, Madame Fisher of The House in Paris lies prone, in her case in a sick bed in her narrow Paris house, while all around her is in flux. Also like Kurtz, she is described well before we meet her and her influence is felt by others: her being ill creates not an absence but a presence. Her grown daughter Naomi tells their young visitor, Henrietta, “She is constantly ill, but wonderfully full of spirit.” Henrietta feels that Mme Fisher’s illness made her “sound most forbidding” () and when told she will be brought to see her, feels “like a meal being fattened up for a lion” (). Indeed, even before she meets Mme Fisher, Henrietta lies down for a rest, “stretched straight out in alarmed passivity, as though on an operating table” (). In a way similar to Marlow replicating Kurtz’s illness and prefiguring the way Lou in “Roses” will stretch out in the position of the disabled Josephine, Henrietta begins to absorb Mme Fisher’s prone state and her status as a patient almost as soon as she enters the house.
We are invited to read Madame Fisher’s disability as the result of her exercising an uncanny power over others. She is described as a “witch” () and compared to the other kind of madam, a “woman who sells girls” (). She first becomes ill/disabled in “The Past,” the middle section of the novel, after her most stunning but Pyrrhic victory – manipulating her protégé Max Ebhart until he rebels against her influence by committing suicide. Because he was the one person she loved, this success devastates her and she takes to her bed. Ten years later, in “The Present,” she meets Max’s young son, unborn at the time of Max’s death. Past relationships and events repeat themselves in the present, but as pale reflections of their former intensity. Now, from her sick bed, she manipulates Leopold, reinforcing, as she had done with his father, his narcissism and ambition. By exercising her power over Leopold, Mme Fisher makes herself sicker than she has been in a long time (). Her small collapse reflects the former, larger one, the physical result of her psychological victory over Max. Like the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnet, Mme Fisher’s “strength’s abundance weakens [her] own heart”; she has collapsed as a result of her own dominance. Imagery surrounding Mme Fisher’s hands suggests she is a sort of conductor, orchestrating the lives of others. The positions of her hands are stressed when both children, Henrietta and Leopold, separately visit her in “The Present.” When Leopold temporarily resists her, “[u]nder the blankets, Mme Fisher’s hands moved with muffled force at her sides” (). In “The Past,” Mme Fisher had succeeded in conducting Max away from his engagement with her daughter Naomi and toward the rich Englishwoman Karen Michaelis. I have argued elsewhere that Max’s suicide results from his sudden, devastating awareness of his own inauthenticity as he realizes he has sought just what Mme Fisher wished him to seek: the more advantageous marriage Karen offers. Here what is noteworthy is that both Naomi and Karen depict her manipulations as tangible – Naomi tells Karen that Max had seen that his love for her “had fallen into her hands” () and Karen picks up this imagery soon thereafter when she says “[i]t may have killed him to see his love for me in her hands” (). With her powerful conducting hands, Mme Fisher has destroyed the being – Max – she meant to shape. When Leopold is brought to see her, Mme Fisher shakes hands with him, and then, “raising her hand a little, looked at it reflectively, as though glad life should have been renewed, for a moment even, by its meeting with Leopold’s” (). She feels that she has been reunited with a young version of Max, reading “a known map of thought and passion in
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miniature” (). Her most important power play is to give Leopold imagery with which to understand himself, to influence his self-conception and reinforce his narcissism. Knowing he feels trapped by his adoptive family, she tells him, “To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height” (). Leopold grasps onto this image as to a lifeline, asking, “Does a tree do that?” and repeating the image later to Henrietta (). The image of the tomb, moreover, seems to emerge from Mme Fisher’s own sick room, a room startlingly “full and still,” where Mme Fisher lies “flat and straight” with a face that looks “skullish” (–); she confirms that she sees her room as a kind of tomb when she refers to her meeting with Leopold as her “short time of being alive again” (). When Ray Forrestier – the husband of his biological mother, Karen – comes to get Leopold, he hears the influence of Madame Fisher in the boy’s speech. Ray tells him, “‘When people are ill alone they think things crooked, you know. . .. She counts much less than you think.’ Leopold said calmly: ‘Have you met Mme Fisher?’” (). When Ray admits that he hasn’t, Leopold shrugs and turns away, his confidence confirming Mme Fisher’s significance. Later, Ray thinks that Leopold will need to behave differently under his care: “You will notice, we talk where I can talk. You will not quote Madame Fisher, you will not kick me in taxis” (). It is clear even to Ray that Leopold has latched onto a self-picture presented to him by Mme Fisher. Much as Marlow contracts Kurtz’s illness and perhaps corruption, Leopold is bequeathed Mme Fisher’s narcissistic ambition to break out of a tomblike environment and make a mark. Like Kurtz’s, Mme Fisher’s prone body is animated by her bright, “burning” eyes (), by her verbal dominance – her lips move by “some other agency” () – and by the symbolic power of her conducting hands. Although she becomes ill and disabled through the exercise of her power, the novel does not set disability and power totally in opposition to each other. Instead, the continuing authority emanating from Mme Fisher’s prone body emphasizes the ways in which her power was always mental. Naomi tells Karen, “she is all mind and will” (). Naomi’s statement both does and does not correspond with Max’s analysis: “her sex is all in her head, but she is not a woman for nothing” (). Mme Fisher’s power and agency are in her head, Max admits, but her body matters. Amidst the bustle of the city of Paris, she lies still in her dark sick room, with “a passionate un-resignation . . . written across her features” (). Mme Fisher controls and destabilizes events in the novel’s plot while also creating thematic instability by combining weakness with power, absence
with an unforgettable presence. Her ill body serves as a fulcrum around which the other characters circle, exercising in turn their own weakness (Henrietta’s “alarmed passivity” may be emblematic of Karen’s and Max’s similarly dreamlike and “overwrought” actions) and their own wills. She not only makes evident how the past commands the present, as the structure of the novel suggests, but through her powerful proneness, her strange combination of passivity and activity, figures a challenge within modernism to the ideals, and even the definitions of, newness, action, and health.
Bowen’s “Look at All Those Roses” The causal relationship between power and stillness is inverted in Bowen’s “Look at All Those Roses,” the title story of a collection: in this story, a paralyzed teenager gathers power by virtue of her stillness. And she is able to transmit this stillness and part of its power to a bored and anxious woman, Lou, returning to London with her lover, Edward. Josephine’s power is symbolized first by the “sheath of startling flowers” that surrounds her house (). When Lou and Edward’s car breaks down, they decide with some trepidation to approach the house. As in The House in Paris, the house itself becomes one of the story’s characters: “There stood the house, waiting. Why should a house wait? Most pretty scenes have something passive about them, but this looked like a trap baited with beauty, set ready to spring” (). The beauty of the roses comes from an unsettling intensity; they are “over-charged with colour, as though this were their one hour” (). The intense color of the roses is echoed in the intense living of Josephine Mather, who lives with her mother in this house. Both the roses and Josephine are described as “burning” (, ), both make Lou uneasy, and both finally prompt in Lou a correspondingly burning or intense moment of a paradoxically energizing “indifference,” emblematized at the end of the story by a “white circle.” Because the story is, in part, a mystery, critics have paid little attention to the character of Josephine, or to the ways her stillness generates power. Instead, they focus on the story’s sense of horror, which arises from the isolation and trap-like beauty of the house, the vague claim that Josephine’s paralysis is her “father’s doing” (), and the implied murder of Mr. Mather by his wife. Hearing that Mr. Mather has disappeared, “Lou indulged for a minute the astounding fancy that Mr. Mather lay at the roses’ roots . . .” (). Her “fancy” seems to be confirmed at the end of the
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story when Edward tells Lou that she will not believe “what he had heard in the village about the abrupt disappearance of Mr. Mather” (). But the true climax of the story is not when we realize – or at least suspect – that Mrs. Mather has killed her husband because by carelessness or brutality he disabled their daughter. Instead, it lies in a modernist moment of transformation and release, a moment brought about by the stillness of the paralyzed Josephine. Lou is described as clinging to Edward “largely out of contentiousness” (). Even though she wants to stay at the house for tea while Edward seeks help with the car, she fears being left behind. “She was determined to be a necessity. Therefore she seldom let him out of her sight – her idea of love was adhesiveness” (). It is this adhesiveness that is challenged by the detachment and self-sufficiency of the house and its inhabitants. Josephine Mather “command[s]” the view from both windows in her sitting room. Lying “flat as a board,” she has “an unresigned, living face; one hand crept on the rug over her breast. Lou felt, here was the nerve and core of the house” (). These sentences could just as easily describe Mme Fisher. Not only are both characters “unresigned,” representing the “nerve and core” of their respective houses, but both texts focus on the disabled characters’ powerful hands, with Josephine’s creeping hand signaling a witchlike power. When Lou tells Josephine that their car has broken down, she says, “I know, I wondered whether it might.” Lou responds that she must have “put the evil eye on it” (). Although she says this jokingly, she suddenly feels “apprehensive, threatened,” identifying with the roses that she feels are being “forced . . . magnetized into being” (). The suggestion of entrapment increases when she realizes that Edward has walked off with their money. Soon thereafter an allusion to Hades’s entrapment of Persephone completes the portrayal of Lou’s dangerous position (). While this atmosphere of threat helps to create the story’s suspense, it takes on another meaning if we focus on the narrative of Lou’s psychology. From this angle, the atmosphere represents a threat to Lou’s modus operandi: her adhesiveness and what she comes to think of as her mobility. Moving outside to collect roses with Josephine, whose “carriage had been wheeled out on the lawn between the rosebeds” (), Lou finds herself so anxious about Edward’s absence that she has to reassure herself that he would surely not abandon their car (). Josephine then suggests that Lou lie down next to her, and they will “pretend we’re both asleep.” The next two paragraphs, in my reading, are the crux of the story. In them, Lou
lets go of her need to clutch at Edward; by framing this epiphany in terms of staying still, she casts immobility as power and liberation. Lou lay down on the dry, cropped grass alongside the wheels of the carriage: she crossed her hands under her head, shut her eyes and lay stretched, as rigid as Josephine. At first she was so nervous, she thought the lawn vibrated under her spine. Then slowly she relaxed. There is a moment when silence, no longer resisted, rushes into the mind. She let go, inch by inch, of life, that since she was a child she had been clutching so desperately – her obsessions about this and that, her obsession about keeping Edward. How anxiously she had run from place to place, wanting to keep everything inside her own power. I should have stayed still: I shall stay still now, she thought. What I want must come to me: I shall not go after it. People who stay still generate power. Josephine stores herself up, and so what she wants happens, because she knows what she wants. I only think I want things; I only think I want Edward. (He’s not coming and I don’t care, I don’t care.) I feel life myself now. No wonder I’ve been tired, only half getting what I don’t really want. Now I want nothing; I just want a white circle. The white circle distended inside her eyelids and she looked into it in an ecstasy of indifference. She knew she was looking at nothing – then knew nothing . . . ()
Lou here replicates Josephine’s rigid stillness. The “dry, cropped grass” on which she lies resonates with the dryness of her life with Edward, in which “they looked forward to nothing with particular pleasure” (). The reference to her spine connects her to the paralyzed Josephine. Her “stretched” position echoes the numbing vistas – “stupefying” “stretches of horizon” – she and Edward drove through before the car broke down. But in her stillness she lets go of her obsessions and anxiety, jointly described as “run[ning] from place to place.” Her conclusions that she “should have stayed still,” that she will “stay still now,” and that “people who stay still generate power” cap the story’s use of disability as centeredness. When she decides that “Josephine stores herself up” she stresses an authenticity of identity that Josephine has, but that she herself lacks. Her assertion that “what [Josephine] wants happens” returns us to Josephine’s comment that she thought Lou and Edward’s car might break down – she wanted some company, because “[n]obody comes to see us” (). Lou’s realization, “I feel life myself now,” is the heart of this passage. Instead of clinging to an idea of what her life should be like, she is feeling it directly in the presence of, and in the physical attitude of, Josephine. Veering away from compulsory ablebodiedness, this scene idealizes bodily immobility as a state of sublime calm.
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The “ecstasy of indifference” Lou achieves in this moment counters her habitual adhesiveness, but more than that it grants her freedom from what she has been taught to want (heterosexual romance, for example) and helps her approach a more authentic state of desire or, more accurately, non-desire. Twice in her earlier conversations with Mrs. Mather, Lou asked whether she wasn’t afraid. The indifference she now achieves was previously modeled by Mrs. Mather’s answers to those questions. When Lou asked, “Then aren’t you rather . . . alone? – I mean, if anything happened,” Mrs. Mather said, “Nothing more can happen.” When Lou then asked, “aren’t you afraid of falling?” while climbing trees to pick damsons, she simply replied, “Why?” (). The “white circle” Lou now secures symbolizes this imperturbability, which is far from empty, but which protects “an occupying inner life” (). Here she achieves, for this important moment, what John Whittier-Ferguson describes as a “modernist practice of indifference.” This state of being is not identical to not-feeling; instead, it combines presence and absence, identity and detachment; it is a variation of disinterestedness, a kind of stillness of purpose that allows one to relate directly to the world outside the self. Lou’s acquiescence to the white circle, the “moment when silence . . . rushes into the mind,” is brought to an abrupt halt by Edward’s arrival in a taxi: normalcy has come to claim her. Lou busies herself gathering up roses offered by the Mathers, her back symbolically to the road. Her embrace of the Mathers’ gift of roses and her question to Edward, “is there such a hurry?” mark Lou’s weak resistance to being pulled back into her everyday, prosaic life. As Michael Whitworth writes about the modernist poem, “[a] problem for modernists was how to make a poem stop, without implying that it had achieved cognitive closure on fundamentally open-ended problems.” Similarly, Bowen’s story, which ends on the question of whether Mrs. Mather killed her husband, neither answers that question nor decides upon the more existential question of whether Lou will carry forward her sense of stillness and indifference or simply return to her habit of anxious mobility. Nor is it clear whether the normalcy enforced (to use Davis’s phrase) at the end of the story is meant to be embraced or lamented by readers. Although Edward tells Lou she is well out of the Mather home, readers may understand him as the voice of entrapment, a call away from the authenticity and calm, the withdrawal and mental privacy, of the white circle.
Disability’s Disruptions Disability in each of these modernist texts makes something happen; but what it makes happen is ambiguous. Much as readers are uncertain about Lou’s psychological future, we are uncertain whether Marlow has absorbed the corruption of imperialism with his illness – is this what is confirmed by his lie to the Intended? We are, moreover, uncertain whether Leopold has been ruined by Mme Fisher’s stoking of his egoistic desires – will his new stepfather Ray tame him into normalcy and is that to be desired? We only know that the bright eyes, arresting speech, and commanding hands of Kurtz, Mme Fisher, and Josephine Mather arise from the materiality of their prone bodies, representing threats to the illusion of self-sovereignty both from outside and from within the psyches of the nondisabled characters. Marlow’s grave illness, Henrietta’s “alarmed passivity,” Leopold’s dangerous narcissism, Lou’s white circle – these characters absorb disability’s otherness into the normate self. There is more than a hint of appropriation in this series of absorptions: in each of these texts the disabled character, uncanny and to some extent gothicized, provides something to or changes something for the nondisabled character(s) whose perspective(s) we are granted. So the disabled characters do function as what Mitchell and Snyder have termed “narrative prostheses.” And yet the power of their stillness renders them irreducible to mere instruments or foils. Each maintains an authentic self and potency independent of, and indeed incommensurate with, the nondisabled characters’ responses to them. The prone bodies of Kurtz, Madame Fisher, and Josephine Mather do not transcend their weakness to achieve power; their vivid, embodied materiality resists transcendence in a way that echoes weak theory’s resistance to transcendental philosophical modes. The characters are powerful while remaining weak, and to some degree they are powerful through their weakness. While the textual embrace of their weakness does counter the older narrative of modernism as “strong people exhibiting strength,” as Saint-Amour puts it, it does not quite bear out weak theory’s characterization of modernism as “weakness that stays weak.” Instead, through their sometimes sinister, semi-gothic power, these characters, like weak theory itself, offer “a new vantage from which to theorize power.” They aid us in letting go of what Saint-Amour describes as a devotion within modernist studies to “normative senses of strength and weakness.” As evolutionary and psychoanalytic theories promulgated by Darwin and Freud destabilized western assumptions about the discrete,
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autonomous, and sovereign self, modernist writers gained a newly acute awareness of bodies’ weakness and permeability, of the absence of strong boundaries protecting the self from the (human and nonhuman) other in all its feared difference. This new consciousness of our common physical, mental, and existential fragility led to an interest in disability that helped to shape modernism’s vaunted ambiguity and instability. The powerful weakness of these prone characters is a site of modernist uncertainty, as authors confronted these our human bodies, bodies that twist and break, that collapse and go mad, and yet that cannot be separated from who we are, that serve as our only mechanisms for acting on our world. As writers reconsidered Cartesian dualism in light of Darwinian and Freudian thought, they found that, as Woolf put it, the “creature within . . . cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant.” And so their explorations of disabled, mad, and weak bodies and minds were explorations of the relationship between embodiment and subjectivity. And their depictions of the transformations wrought on nondisabled characters by their disabled counterparts were an acknowledgment of a deep and foundational intersubjectivity, an admission that otherness is in the heart, not only of darkness, but of the self.
Notes Paul Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” in “Weak Theory,” special issue, Modernism/modernity . (), –. The claim by weak theorists that, as Saint-Amour describes it, “there are other things to do with weakness than to triumph over it” () is closely related to Alison Kafer’s critique of the “curative imaginary,” a critique influential in disability studies. See Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –, . My thinking about proneness has been influenced by Louise Hornby’s article “Downwrong: The Pose of Tiredness,” Modern Fiction Studies . (Spring ), –. Maren Linett, Bodies of Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), . Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul Armstrong, Norton Critical Edition, th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (New York: Anchor Books, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Virginia Woolf, The Years, ed. Eleanor McNees (New York: Harcourt, ), .
There are of course important distinctions between illness and disability, and between physical disability and madness; as G. Thomas Couser points out, “lumping the disabled with the ill threatens to eclipse the social model and thus to obviate any need for accommodation.” See Couser, “Illness,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, ), . While aware of the political risks in thus collapsing madness, disability, and illness, for the purposes of this chapter I am provisionally combining the several conditions in order to focus on the prone positions in which we find the three characters. Jonathan Hsy, “Disability,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, ); Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, ); Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ); Eunjung Kim, Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, ); Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); Douglas Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); Jay Dolmage, Disabled upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, ). Joseph Valente, “Other Possibilities, Other Drives: Queer, Counterfactual ‘Life’ in Truman Capote’s ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms,’” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies . (), –; Courtney Andree, “Bildung Sideways: Queer/ Crip Development and E. M. Forster’s ‘Fortunate Failure,’” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies . (), –; Matt Franks, “Mental Inversion, Modernist Aesthetics, and Disability Exceptionalism in Olive Moore’s ‘Spleen,’” in “Disability and Generative Form,” special issue, Journal of Modern Literature . (), –; Matt Franks, “Serving on the Eugenic Homefront: Virginia Woolf, Race, and Disability,” Feminist Formations, . (), –; Todd Carmody, “In Spite of Handicaps: The Disability History of Racial Uplift,” American Literary History . (), –; Ann Fox, “A Different Integration: Race and Disability in EarlyTwentieth-Century African American Drama by Women,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers . (), –; Jess Waggoner, “‘My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience’: Afro-Modernist Critiques of Eugenics and Medical Segregation,” Modernism/modernity . (),
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–; Jess Waggoner, “‘The Seriously Injured of Our Civic Life’: Imagining Disabled Collectivity in Depression-Era Crip Modernisms,” Modern Fiction Studies . (Spring ), –; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic: Race, Disability, and the Making of an International Eugenic Science, –,” Disability & Society . (), –; and David Mitchell with Sharon Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). Janet Lyon, “On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew.” Modernism/ modernity . (September ), –; Joseph Valente, “The Accidental Autist: Neurosensory Disorder in ‘The Secret Agent,’” in “Disability and Generative Form,” special issue, Journal of Modern Literature . (), –; Rebecah Pulsifer, “Contemplating the Idiot in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Between the Acts,’” Journal of Modern Literature, . (), –; Courtney Andree, “Cripping the Pastoral: Rural Modernisms and ‘The True Heart,’” Modern Fiction Studies . (Spring ), –; Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA . (March ), –; Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (New York: New York University Press, ); Claire Barber-Stetson, “Slow Processing: A New Minor Literature by Autists and Modernists,” in “Disability and Generative Form,” special issue, Journal of Modern Literature . (), –; Julia Rodas, Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). Rebecca Sanchez, Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (New York: New York University Press, ). Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, ); James Berger, The Disarticulate: Language, Modernity, and the Narratives of Modernity (New York: New York University Press, ). Michael Davidson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ) and Invalid Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, ). In a related point in his discussion of Foucault, Siebers writes, “Hidden underneath the docile body – the body invented by the modern age and now recognized as the only body – is the able body.” See Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), . Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, ), –. Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, ), . There is still debate, often tiresomely apologetic for Conrad, about the extent to which the narrative’s irony lessens its racism.
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’” in Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul Armstrong, Norton Critical Edition, th ed. (W. W. Norton, ), . Achebe, “Image of Africa,” . Martin Bock has usefully explored and contextualized Conrad’s understandings of disease; he notes that the miasmic theory of disease “posits that certain diseases were endemic to particular geographical regions, climates, or altitudes.” See Bock, “Joseph Conrad and Germ Theory: Why Captain Allistoun Smiles Thoughtfully,” Conradian . (Autumn ), . Charlotte Rogers similarly explains that Conrad “depicts the tropics as . . . most important, an environment capable of causing both mental and physical illness.” See Rogers, Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, ), . Lorenzo Servitje writes that “Conrad uses disease . . . to signify the effects of European imperialism.” See Servitje, “‘Triumphant Health’: Joseph Conrad and Tropical Medicine,” Literature and Medicine . (Spring ), . As he discusses, the Company men who are portrayed as most heartless are depicted as triumphantly healthy. For another insightful exploration of health and illness in the novella, see Cheryl Hindrichs, “‘A Vision of Greyness’: The Liminal Vantage of Illness in ‘Heart of Darkness,’” Modern Fiction Studies . (Spring ), –. James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, ), . This temporality frames the opening of Marlow’s tale, as he says that “this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth” (), locating England’s “darkness” in the past. Baynton, Defectives in the Land, . Ellen Samuels further establishes that “the discourses of racial identification institutionalized by physical anthropologists developed in intimate connection with nineteenth-century efforts to measure and classify forms of physical and mental difference we would now understand through the rubric of disability.” See Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York: New York University Press, ), . Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, for example, reads the novella as recapitulating the “myth of the West” to “signify that the West is a myth.” See Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Horror of the West,” in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Contemporary Thought: Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe, ed. Nidesh Lawtoo (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, ), . In a response to LacoueLabarthe’s essay, J. Hillis Miller argues that Heart of Darkness is apocalyptic, another version of a strong theoretical reading. See Miller, “‘Heart of Darkness’ Revisited,” in Lawtoo, Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Contemporary Thought, –. In a reading of disability in the political novels, Katherine Isobel Baxter argues that the texts make clear the ways that society cannot control or suppress “the excess of difference” made evident by disability. See Baxter, “‘Soundless as Shadows’: Language and Disability in the Political Novels,” in Conrad and
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Language, ed. Katherine Isobel Baxter and Robert Hampson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . Saint-Amour points out that modernism was “inextricable from the loss of metanarrative, attending to myth as a lost or impossible object of desire” (“Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” ). The loss of the myth of Kurtz is one of the reasons Heart of Darkness has long been a canonical, indeed even inaugurating, modernist text. Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (New York: Anchor Books, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Both Karen and Naomi agree that this victory was devastating to her. Naomi explains to Karen, “I saw then that all her life her power had never properly used itself, and that now it had used itself she was like the dead, like someone killed in a victory” (). Karen later echoes this, saying, “it was her power she loved. That time it overreached itself; that was all . . .” (). There is some debate over whether Mme Fisher’s influence on Leopold is liberating or destructive. I agree with Bennett and Royle that it is partly liberatory, but that her manipulations are cast primarily as destructive by the novel insofar as they parallel her “commendation” to Max that prompted his suicide. See Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (New York: Macmillan, ), –. It is by praising, by encouraging ambition in Max and his son, that she does the most damage. When Henrietta comes into the sick room, Mme Fisher greets her. “‘Good morning, Mme Fisher,’ Henrietta replied. The hand she saw in the shadows did not stir on the sheet, so she stayed where she was on the parquet beside the door” (). When Leopold comes in, he finds the hand above the bedsheets, ready to shake. After they shake hands, “regretfully she drew the hand back under the bedclothes . . .” (). Maren Linett, “Modes of Dislocation: Jewishness and Deafness in Elizabeth Bowen,” Studies in the Novel . (Summer ), –. When she has just conceived Leopold, Karen thinks that if there were to be a child, he would be the “mark our hands did not leave on the grass” (). As Bennett and Royle point out, the idea of a mark or trace runs throughout the novel (Elizabeth Bowen, –). “Some sort of alarm must sound in her senses the moment she was forgotten – which happened so seldom – sound, and start angry anguish, making her strike the floor” (). Naomi and her mother are locked in a power struggle in which Naomi feels bound to her mother, unable to travel, while Mme Fisher feels trapped by Naomi’s ministrations: “These days I may do nothing, not even die, I am so much under control” (). John Whittier-Ferguson, Framing Pieces: Designs of the Gloss in Joyce, Woolf, and Pound (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Michael Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, ), .
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), –. Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” , . Ibid., . Ibid., . Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” in The Moment and Other Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, Brace, ), .
Affect’s Vocabularies Literature and Feeling after David James
Affective states and their representational forms have been as crucial to critical constructions of modernism as to the writing we associate with its multiple movements, moments, and legacies. From modernism’s early twentieth-century zenith to its reanimations in the twenty-first, versions of Henry James’s conviction endure: when writers show that “impressions are experience,” they show too that perceptions motivate actions; that affective awareness has embodied consequences; that private senses have social entailments; and that the formal enterprise of narrating emotion may, as a result, focus as intensively on material environments as on psychological interiority. At the confluence of represented feeling and registrations of affect, ambitions of otherwise historically distinct writers come into conversation. To see how this conversation might enhance modernist studies’ critical-affective literacies, I follow a transhistorical rather than a discretely periodized arc in the coming pages, with the view to gauging the conceptual challenges and interpretive opportunities that come with close reading affective representation as it interlaces modernism’s formal aspirations and political valences. What does it mean, though, to read for affect in the first place? Affect studies, in all its methodological heterogeneity, may give the impression that its vocabularies occupy a relatively distinct if internally variegated domain, one that’s yet to be fully imported into the study and teaching of modernism. Yet it’s not unreasonable to think that modernist studies may already be well versed in affective criticism, regardless of how far the field today converges upon the (inter)disciplinary space of the history of emotions or how explicitly modernist critics now draw upon affect theory’s myriad frameworks. Consider some of the foundational accounts of modernist form: Fredric Jameson’s story of literary impressionism as an enthralling yet compensatory “transformation” of social “realities into style”; Leo Bersani’s inquest into modernist fiction’s “aesthetic of redemption” as a stunning yet seductive “correction of life” that offers an
illusory “negation of the reality of pain”; and Ann Banfield’s examination in of modernism’s “revolutionary conception of the objects of sensation, at once physical and subjective.” Aren’t these also, essentially, compelling accounts of affect? Regarded as such, they would suggest that affective vocabularies have always been integral to the theoretical and historical anatomy of the field. That they turn out to be so integral only on reflection, however, highlights the extent to which these vocabularies haven’t received deliberate or sustained metacritical examination. The reasons for this may be linked both to the volatility of affect as an object of analytical inquiry and to the very assumptions we make about modernism’s economies of feeling. “To admit that we do not always know how to articulate our affects,” writes Marta Figlerowicz, “but should nevertheless be trusted as sources of insight into their significance, can be read unfavorably as narcissistic intuitionism.” Figlerowicz acknowledges that this “could even make the study of affect sound like an unquestioned demand that others attend to one’s inner life – and take one’s word for its contents and importance – based solely on its immediate, often inarticulate intensity.” This sort of critical subjectivism seems a far cry from the combination of methodical close reading and assiduous historicism that has arguably remained the backbone of modernist studies. Affect’s apparent neglect, however, also has to do with received portraits of the very temperament of modernism itself. As Julie Taylor observes, “[i]f modernism’s affective dimensions have historically been under-researched, perhaps this is because scholars have tended to emphasize modernists’ aesthetic preferences for irony and detachment over embodied sentiment,” with the result that “dismissals of feeling have been central to the rhetoric of rupture that has helped critics to retrospectively solidify modernism as a coherent ‘movement.’” Yet disciplinary times are changing in ways that are likely to increase affect’s critical purchase. The solidity of modernism’s own cultural, formal, and institutional coherence is now being dissolved under pressures of reform that not only leave it unanchored from any single “movement” but also liberate its aesthetic practices from the impersonal language of rupture that has seemed inimical to a more expansive range of affective readings. Furthermore, beyond the realm of literary representation, the very disputes and solidarities that have shaped the new modernist studies as a home for comparative and interdisciplinary constituencies are themselves affectively contoured. Critical passions continue to run high, even – perhaps especially – in the process of progressively eroding the field’s own terminological strongholds and geohistorical enclosures. Accordingly,
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“if modernist studies,” according to Paul Saint-Amour, has, “for a while now, been weakening its immanent theory of modernism without saying so, it would be worth considering the role affect might have played in that disavowed weakening, and might still have to play in its avowal.” Without claiming to respond fully to this invitation, I will suggest in the coming discussion that reading for the formal and ethical lineaments of affect in modernist literature fruitfully coincides with an examination of the field’s own critical pulses and parameters, a field in which “modernism now functions, in local and provisional ways, as an auxiliary term that supports other lines of argument not endogenous to its problem-space.” As scholars have pursued some of these alternative arguments in recent years, perspectives on modernist form that draw from insights of precarity studies and disability studies have become especially vital. Narratives concerned with the ontology of disenfranchisement and bodily abjection require us to consider the formal strategies that perpetuate or else resist the way “literary representations of people with disabilities,” as Michael Bérubé observes, “often serve to mobilize pity or horror in a moral drama that has nothing to do with the actual experience of disability.” Modernist fiction’s displaced, vulnerable, or destitute lives don’t simply affect us by eliciting our sympathy, as we will later see, when I turn to one conspicuously neglected novelist of the interwar period; delineating instead the experiential complexities of social and ontological precarity, they demonstrate how style itself – its grammatical fibers, palpable solicitations, and disarming refractions – implicates readers, precisely by calling some of the complacencies of compassion to account. By these critical lights, it’s understandable that approaches to affective form in modernism have operated predominantly within the thematic ambits of failure, disappointment, negation, or loss. With its idiomatic concern with the material costs and metaphysical convulsions of mourning, trauma, and dispossession, modernist literature offers graphic reasons “to pursue a fuller engagement with negative affects,” in Heather Love’s account, along “with the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics.” In fact, it would seem quite logical to view modernism’s “rhetoric of rupture,” to recall Taylor’s phrase, as especially suited to evoking a whole range of atrocities and their painful aftermaths, at both global and intimately personal scales. We might thereby suppose that the very “movement of affect” in modernist textuality “depends” for its synthesis of technical innovation and political provocation “on its capacity to work with negation,” in Isobel Armstrong’s words, “to accomplish the labour of the negative.” One consequence of this supposition, however,
is that artistic interests in reparative or ameliorative experiences (solace, respite, hope) have come to seem anathema to the critical pursuit of modernism’s political potency, even though we might well ask, as Eve Sedgwick memorably did, why the pieties of “demystifying exposure” should continue to make “pleasure and amelioration so ‘mere.’” Disenchanted, thoroughly unredeemed, militantly unsentimental: works that manifest these traits have become lodestones in accounts of modernism’s oppositional force. Writing from the perspective of postcolonial studies, for instance, Neil Lazarus argues that the “ongoing critical dimension of modernist literary practice” is most apparent in later twentieth-century writing that “protests and criticizes.” Insofar as such work (and the novel is Lazarus’s privileged genre) graphically “resists the accommodationism of what has been canonized as modernism,” it extends what early twentieth-century writers had originally achieved through their refusal of “integration, resolution, consolation, comfort.” Emblematic of this recrudescence of resistance – whereby formal disruption productively ensures emotional unsettlement – are The Unconsoled () and Never Let Me Go (). In Lazarus’s account, Kazuo Ishiguro’s concern with aborted, deceptive, or otherwise compromised compensations “engenders ‘disconsolation’ in us as readers” – fulfilling, in a contemporary moment, modernism’s resistance to salving resolutions and uplifting counterplots to historical or psychological harm. It is tempting to sanctify modernism’s enchantment with disenchantment, its outlawing of solace, its disruption of aesthetic integrity as means of rectifying the injuries of modernity. But I want to resist that temptation. I do so to suggest that it now seems both timely and necessary to broaden the compass for registering unpredictably coalescing affects in modernist writing – negative and reparative, disconsolate and ameliorative – so as to facilitate more accommodating accounts of modernist representations of felt experience. One segment of this inquiry will show how stylistic innovations belonging to the modernist era and to fiction closer to our own illuminate the ethical and epistemic valences of affective representation. To the extent that modernist strategies for evoking feeling continue to enrich contemporary writing – as thematic material, as an occasion for structural or linguistic experimentation, or as the intensification of the reader’s intellectual and emotional involvement – they also exceed narrow periodizations of modernism itself. Such creative dialogues with modernist aesthetics across a more expansive timeline further our sense of the critical and literary-historical consequentiality of elaborating affective vocabularies. For the closing section, though, I will deliberately return to a moment at
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mid-century, in order to consider a “late modernist” novel in which style itself emphasizes the political stakes of reading for the poetics of emotion.
Archives of Affect Intersections between the new modernist studies and affect studies are perpetually evolving. Recent work on how emotional representation catalyzes formal, generic, and characterological experimentation can also reveal much about affect’s own interpretive and theoretical heterogeneity as an optic. Santanu Das, for instance, sets out to “open up new ways of ‘reading’ – and writing – life, and particularly colonial lives, in times of war” by offering a moving account of “the tumultuous world of feeling” that remained a “central chord in the sepoy writing of the First World War.” This affective archive of hitherto overlooked “life-writing,” broadly conceived, brings us into contact with “the role of the sensuous, the material and the contingent: they force us to weave together a narrative of fugitive fragments, the flotsam, jetsam and lagan of life wrecked by war.” Chiming with Das’s attention to seemingly ephemeral yet personally profound interactions between textual (self-)representation and affective experience, Sarah Cole invites us to distinguish violence as one of modernist literature’s controversial conditions of possibility. She contends that “the scenario of represented violence” in modernist writing “might be said to perform in itself one of the basic achievements of literature: to see in a single moment, episode, or narrative the intensity of subjective life, and also the inseparable interchange of that experience with the large forces of culture and history.” This, we might say, marks the promise yet also the challenge of entering archives of affective representation in the age of modernism. The opportunity to limn in such writing the protean currents of emotional experience is accompanied by the inevitable obligation to “scale up” such readings, in order to extrapolate from minute structures of feeling larger insights about modernism’s response to historical damage and the ethical demands its literary renditions face. For some theorists, of course, affect typically exceeds both of these critical trajectories – scuppering meticulous exegesis and large-scale extrapolation with equal measure – just as it dodges semiotic capture. If, as Figlerowicz points out, the “mediated nature of affects depicted in literature has at times made contemporary theory wary of poems and novels as modes of affective inquiry,” then formative accounts of affect’s “autonomy” have in turn sought to promote its resistance to linguistic examination altogether. In Brian Massumi’s framework, for example, “affect is
intensity”; as such, it usually ends up being “qualified” by the “semantically and semiotically formed progressions” of narrativization. The “problem,” for Massumi, “is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect,” largely because “[o]ur entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure.” Unlike emotion – which, in his view, is “a subjective content” pressed “into function and meaning” – affect is “irreducibly bodily and autonomic,” escaping the “narrativizable action-reaction circuits” and structuring pretensions of representation. As a consequence, Massumi advises that “structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a selfconsistent set of invariant generative rules.” But is structure really that constraining or, for that matter, so “selfconsistent” as to seem uneventful? Modernist fiction suggests not. Consider To the Lighthouse (), where moments of affective intensity suffuse structures of narrative design, as Woolf incrementally builds pathos across the novel’s wrenchingly distinct parts. This pathos peaks arguably not in the painterly crescendo of the novel’s final sequence – though Lily Briscoe’s closing brush stroke, undeniably, presents its own poignant effort to pit structure against the Ramsays’ devastating losses, a “vision” confronting the void of grief that’s temporarily materialized in a picture whose “lines running up and across” memorialize her “attempt at something” – but rather in Woolf’s shortest, middle section. Reflecting on the affective implications of structure in July , Woolf described “Time Passes” as an “impersonal thing, which I’m dared to do by my friends.” Into this searing interregnum the passing of Prue, Andrew, and Mrs Ramsay are incised, the bleak suddenness of their deaths reproduced typographically by austere square parentheses. Woolf knew that this decade-long interval would not only evoke “the flight of time” in the wake of war but also effect a “consequent break of unity in my design.” Allowing that structural break to be counterweighed by the plaintive lyricism of the section’s style produces its very own formal pathos as well. Syntax rallies, flourishing from one “impersonal” yet euphonious description of the vacant house to the next, pushing back against that breaking design and the attritions of loss “Time Passes” enfolds. Therein lies the sorrow of language, so to speak, as it parries oblivion under Woolf’s watch: descriptions, however elaborate, seem to concede that they cannot “remain”; nor can they redeem “the swaying mantle of silence” that Woolf’s animating record of absence and stasis nonetheless offers to offset through its luminescence (–). In this sense, To the Lighthouse
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becomes an elegy as much for the novel’s own construction as for the familial disintegration it plots, mourning the obliterated lives the novel cannot sufficiently redress as it traverses “the sands of oblivion” (), even as the energy of its style somehow endures. The subject of Woolf’s elegiac address here may thus be seen to be the very discrepancy between style’s athleticism and diegetic devastation, a discrepancy that shapes an entire novel that appears “to sustain entity” with a mode of narration that, in Gillian Beer’s words, fosters flux and continually “eschews permanence.” This paradox produces affective disparities in the very sinews of narrative discourse. Take, for instance, the observation that in the empty house “loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted” (). Contrary rhythms emerge. The tempo of that second quoted clause here presses forward with the help of a supplementary conjunction to embrace that life-vacated “shape.” With this slight sense of acceleration, Woolf’s parataxis seems to yearn for that “air of pure integrity,” which (as we’re told later in the paragraph) momentarily salves the home’s scars, countering its “emptiness” with an “image” that “[n]othing it seemed could break” (). And yet, on another level – that of diction itself, rather than clausal pace – the language also hangs back, as Woolf nurtures the unhurried effect of accumulating sibilance (those reverberating –ness suffixes, which culminate in the decelerating collocation of “loveliness itself”). A succession of phonematic kinships thus impedes as though to withstand the sentence’s structural onrush, “vanishing so quickly” as its paratactic impressions do (). These counterpointing microelements of expression capture the forking structures of feeling that Woolf herself navigates – embracing a “form from which life had parted” yet also longing to bring life back – as she writes across yet also against time, knowing all the while that stylistic “beauty offers her lures, her consolations” (). Far from being a place where nothing happens, then, structure in this novel generates devastating torque. What this reveals is that style isn’t simply emotionally mimetic of plot; rather, style has an affective plot of its own to convey, one that wrestles with the pain of events without ever suggesting that aesthetic renditions of loss offer adequate or even acceptable consolation. As readers, we too have to navigate this discrepancy, whereby our admiration of the lyrical force of a novel like To the Lighthouse may yield a kind of intellectual uplift that’s held in tension with our sorrowful absorption in shattering events. The critical value of such a book for rechronicling modernist affects lies not in the way it satisfies the usual work of negation – simulating loss in language that leaves us utterly and soberly unconsoled – but in a kind of dual thinking its
form makes possible, a thinking that occurs at the interchange of devastation and compensation, where familial oblivion meets the vivacity of its elegiac rendition, where the grammar of affecting scenes intercepts the affective experience of reading.
Style as Transformation Just after To the Lighthouse’s release, Woolf wrote to Roger Fry about the novel’s now-iconic centerpiece image. Although she insisted that she had “to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together,” Woolf immediately qualified its purpose, insisting that such effects remain polysemic rather than integrated or self-reinforcing: “all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted people would make it the deposit for their own emotions.” Whatever affective reaction the imagery provokes, she reflects to Fry, construing what the lighthouse might stand for is never a matter of “right or wrong.” Woolf might as well have been speaking about affect theory, whose practical takeaways for interpretation are not always clear cut. Presupposing that affective phenomena appeal primarily to “an asignifying philosophy,” to recall Massumi’s model, may not help us to explain how particular textual structures communicate affective experiences. Sianne Ngai has some useful advice here. Addressing the slippery distinction between “affect and emotion,” she suggests that it amounts to a “modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality or kind.” Offering a more pragmatic steer, Derek Attridge recommends that when it comes to invoking feeling, emotion, and affect in textual analysis it’s “best to employ the terms with some sense of these connotations and limitations, but otherwise not to be too particular about the distinctions one might make among them.” Where distinctions do become rather more loaded is in discussions of literary language. Here Jonathan Flatley’s typology is instructive: “emotion suggests something that happens inside and tends toward outward expression,” whereas “affect indicates something relational and transformative,” such that affects “are always amplifying, dampening, or otherwise modifying some other affect.” Amplification and modification, as we have already seen in the case of Woolf’s style, materialize in sentences that don’t simply convey emotional content but embody – structurally, lexically, rhythmically – the affective poignancies and discrepancies of language’s relation to that content. By drawing attention to frictions between rendition and response that this relation generates, I’ve wanted to highlight the
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transformational rather than purely mimetic capacity of affective description – a capacity that’s often so self-reflexive as to foreground style’s fraught efforts to redress, not merely reinforce, the emotional turbulence it conveys. Later we’ll see how, in reckoning with its own transformative efficacy in this sense, style produces an argument about its ethical implications in the work of politically committed novelist Storm Jameson, who wants her readers to feel more than self-congratulatory compassion. For now, disarticulating expression and content raises some useful questions. What if we don’t assume, for instance, that “[s]uccessful symbolmaking,” as Isobel Armstrong warns, “vanquishes affect”? If we also don’t assume that linguistic innovation invariably “represses affect as an outcome of its success,” then what alternative readings of the emotive affordances of and unpredictable responses to literary experimentation become available? Should we, in fact, be “thinking less of the representation of [emotional] elements in the text in terms of substitution of symbol for originary affect,” and instead more about how form itself enables critical thinking about the “reproduction of the conditions of affective life within the text”? And in pursuing that kind of thinking-through-form, what do we make of modernist works that require us to become peculiarly aware of the distance between the emplotment of emotion and our feelings about its expression – the distance between those affecting experiences being relayed and the reader’s alternating degrees of absorption and alienation, attachment and recoil? The stakes of that awareness will be especially pertinent for engaging, as I will later, the relation between social commentary and affective description, where the process of distancing readers from easily accessible, sympathetic involvement contains a strategic political purpose. Before we get there, however, I first want to historicize a style of externalism that’s crucial for grasping connections between critique and affective representation in modernist fiction. I isolate this style partly to lend some interpretive focus and precision to what could otherwise become a bewilderingly multidirectional survey of modernism’s emotive capacities and their innumerable modalities of expression; and partly too because approaches to feeling in literature have over time privileged rich depictions of internal mental states over other varieties of externalized depiction and detached narratorial observation. I embark on this discussion to set the stage for a consideration, at the end of this essay, of how in one of Jameson’s rather understudied novels, the use of externalism has significant emotional and political ramifications. In her work, forgoing interiority is the means by which she denies us the satisfactions of all-consuming pathos, the
externalized rendition of affective states leaving readers unable to expect the conventional gratifications of empathetic identification.
Against Interiority It’s not difficult to see why the affective work of modernist form has often been connected to its stunning evocations of interiority. Literary Impressionism, for one, offered iconic renditions of perception and reflection in Ford, Conrad, Faulkner, and Woolf. Not only had interiority become an aesthetic focus for Impressionism, oriented around the simulation of consciousness; it could also constitute the very substance of plot. Affective reactions and responsibilities remain dramatically central to Impressionism, where scenes of volatile, poignant, and derailing apprehension are populated with or focalized by characters who, in Jesse Matz’s phrase, “stand or fall depending on the genius of their feelings, the staying power of their glances, or the accuracy of their imaginations.” The multifarious legacies of Impressionist fiction are apparent in such different contemporary works as Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (), Toni Morrison’s Paradise (), Zadie Smith’s NW (), Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (), and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (). Not only receiving but avidly arguing with this inheritance is Ian McEwan’s Atonement (). In a story of morally compromised redress, McEwan confronts the alleged artistic indulgences and ethical blind spots of novelistic interiority. Through its quarrel with high modernism, Atonement produces what McEwan himself calls a “commentary on its own creation,” even though his text remains as aesthetically “faithful” as any Impressionist novel would be “to the sensuous, telepathic capabilities of language as it transfers thoughts and feelings from one person’s mind to another’s.” Despite Atonement’s performative indictment of otiose introspection as a detrimental prerogative of modernist narrative, McEwan affirms the traction of Impressionism’s continued attraction for writers today concerned with the novel as a psychological and ethical form. In contrast to these various experiments in psychological mimesis, externalism points us to a rather different cluster of trailblazers and legatees. More aggressively than any other early twentieth-century writer, Wyndham Lewis was this tactic’s advocate. He set out to challenge the amorphousness of novelistic Impressionism (as he saw it) and the verbal overabundance produced by Joyce’s fixation with capturing mental states in granular detail. Novelists ought to pay “more attention” to “the outside of people,” insisted Lewis, so that characters’ “shells, or pelts, or the
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language of their bodily movements, come first, not last.” His objections reached well beyond Joyce, spotlighting a wider tendency in early twentieth-century fiction that Lewis derisively dubbed “the approved ‘mental method.’” This is a mode we would now associate with the virtuosic use of free indirect discourse running from Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen through to James Baldwin’s Another Country (), a method that would ultimately lead, Lewis feared, to the novel’s “physical disintegration and formal confusion.” In Men without Art Lewis’s worries about this widespread promotion of interiority in representations of feeling would touch on all the usual suspects. Henry James, for instance, “did not feel at home with objects,” nor thereby “with the externality of things.” Instead, James “was led into the field of his predilection,” avers Lewis, “which was a twilight feminine universe – of little direct action, and of no gross substance at all.” Although he doesn’t dismiss James – indeed, we’re told that no writer “of the last hundred years” remains “more worthy of serious consideration” – Lewis nonetheless judges that it is “regrettable” that “his activities were all turned inwards instead of outwards.” Faulkner fares rather worse among Lewis’s list of culprits who perpetuate this inward turn. On the evidence of Sartoris (), Sanctuary (), and Light in August (), Lewis sets Faulkner in the dock as a writer whose innovations occasionally rely on “pretended incompetence,” an example of the “psychological method” depending for its affective and aesthetic “‘newness’ on the confused distraction” of Faulkner’s narrators. Granted, Lewis warns his readers early on in Men without Art that “I am not the person to come to for resounding appreciations of Faulkner’s books.” That much we could have guessed. But nothing quite prepares the reader for his waspish generalization that “All [of Faulkner’s characters] are demented: his novels are, strictly speaking, clinics.” Compare this sweeping conclusion with his misgivings about Ulysses, and we find that Lewis was concerned less about the mental health of Joyce’s characters than about that of his prospective audience. Wedded to a mode of “telling from the inside,” Joyce “lands” his readers, as Lewis pities them, “inside an Aladdin’s cave of incredible bric-a-brac in which a dense mass of dead stuff is collected,” thereby “confining the reader in a circumscribed psychological space into which several encyclopaedias have been emptied.” All of which “results,” he concludes – returning to one of his favored gastroenterological tropes – “from the constipation induced in the movement of the narrative.” To inoculate the modernist novel against this epidemic of encyclopedic psychologism, Lewis championed the vaccine of satiric externalism. As
Michael North explains, Lewis “reversed the time-honoured practice of realist fiction, which tends to work by revealing progressively deeper and more complex layers of human behaviour.” In so doing, Lewis “progressively narrows the choices available to his characters, slowly trapping them in the soils of their own small-minded habits, turning them inside out, as it were, to show that the deepest interior is really only the shabby backside of a cheap and worn-out surface.” At the same time, Lewis was adamant that this focus on the exteriorities of modern life shouldn’t be misconstrued simply as an attempt to emulate or aestheticize the impact of advancing mechanization. “AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism) bores us,” he declared in the first issue of Blast: “We don’t want to go about making a hullo-bulloo [sic] about motorcars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes.” In place of the “Melodrama of Modernity,” which had become the vaunted “subject,” in his opinion, “of these fanciful but rather conventional Italians,” the representational adventure for Lewis was about acquiring a language capable of registering the body’s own absurd technologies, with feelings given no more status than physiological traits as component parts of the human machine. Tarr () sits resolutely at this externalist end of the formal-affective spectrum. Relatively early in the novel, we follow Tarr after he grudgingly resolves to visit his lover Bertha. By this point in the narrative, we already know that he treats Bertha with a “famous feeling of indifference,” though irksomely he feels too that she has become attached to him “in some lymphatic manner within his skin.” But as Tarr steps out into the streets, Lewis suspends this nasty reduction of Bertha to physical malady to concentrate instead on the physicality of Tarr himself, evoking not so much his sensory impressions of urban space as the way that space itself warps the reader’s impression of his physique. In the following sequence, Lewis doesn’t merely set the scene; he pulls the strings of Tarr’s appearance to turn him into something like that “generic puppet” who takes center stage in “Inferior Religions” () and who would reappear in other scenarios of mechanized behavior in the The Wild Body collection: The new summer heat drew heavy pleasant ghosts out of the ground, like plants disappeared in winter; specters of energy, bulking the hot air with vigorous dreams. Or they had entered into the trees, in imitation of pagan gods, and nodded their delicate distant intoxication to him. Visions were released in the sap, with scented explosion, the Spring one bustling and tremendous reminiscence. Tarr felt the street was a pleasant current, setting from some immense and tropic gulf, neighboured by Floridas of remote invasions: he ambled
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down it puissantly, shoulders shaped like these waves, a heavy-sided drunken fish. The houses, with winks of the shocked clock-work, were grazed, holding along their surface a thick nap of soft warmth. The heat poured weakly into his veins – a big dog wandering on its easily transposable business, inviting some delightful accident to deflect it from maudlin and massive promenade: in his mind, too, as in the dog’s, his business was doubtful – a small black spot ahead of him in his brain, half puzzling but peremptory.. . . Through the opaquer atmosphere sounds came lazily or tinglingly. People had become a balzacian species, boldly tragic and comic. (–)
Where an Impressionist might have offered a painstaking anatomy of moment-to-moment sensations and the anticipations or recollections they ignite, Lewis gives over much of his stylistic energy to inanimate surroundings. As the effects of sun on animated “sap” rhymes with the “thick nap” of shimmering houses, the reader comes to recognize that heat itself has more charisma than any human figure and becomes description’s preoccupation. With Tarr dissipating into his aquatic saunter, the narrative’s focus and rhetorical energy gradually shift away from his center of perspective, leaving us finally with a glimpse of his insouciant absorption into that crowd of “[B]alzacian species.” Such scenes in this early novel epitomize not simply the way Lewis prioritizes surfaces over psychology, formal outlines over credible feelings, but also the unsettling caresses of a language that conjures flattened, denatured, objectified, or seemingly mechanical feelings. Such feelings would be spotlighted again in “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” where Lewis claims that there’s a good deal of comedy to be had in witnessing “a thing behaving like a person.” Since “all men are necessarily comic,” or at least have the potential to be so, Lewis spots satiric opportunities for portraying individuals as mere “things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.” This mandate receives a postmillennial endorsement in the grippingly impersonal textures of Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy (–). In the series’ titular novel, there’s more than a coincidental correlation between the scrupulous self-effacement of Cusk’s narrator (Faye) and the conviction – voiced by one of the numerous divulgers, as we might call them, who take over the narrative’s reins and lead it in directions over which Faye has little control – that “[e]ven the question of personal style could presumably be broken down as sequential, from a finite number of alternatives.” In one sense, Outline secretes discrepancies between subject matter and expression: we saw these at work in Woolf, as style’s lyrical energy confronts the obliterations that To the Lighthouse recognizes it
cannot wholly redeem by linguistic plenitude alone. In Cusk’s case, however, that sense of discrepancy applies to the way she assembles distinctly personal disclosures in a suspenseful yet depersonalized register, and her affinity there with a Lewisian emphasis on characters’ “shells, or pelts, or the language of their bodily movements” becomes apparent. Outline showcases this externalizing strategy in a queasy scene where the wealthy, elderly “neighbor” – whom our narrator encounters on her plane to Greece, before agreeing to meet him again aboard his luxury boat – finally makes the move we’ve been tensely expecting for some time, as he “momentously” announces his infatuation and goes in for a kiss (): “The great beak of his nose loomed at the edge of my field of vision, his claw-like hands with their white fur fumbled at my shoulders; I felt myself, momentarily, being wrapped around in his greyness and dryness, as though the prehistoric creature were wrapping me in its dry bat-like wings, felt his scaly mouth miss its mark and move blindly at my cheek” (–). Self-possessed, serene even, Cusk’s style counterpoints the disconcerting instance she forensically brings into being. Descriptions of a clumsy suitor making bathetic advances itemize his bodily features with such an unnerving degree of particularism that detail, for an instant, overtakes immediate feeling. This in turn has the disquieting effect of screening the narrator’s own reactions amid what, for the reader, remains a vividly cringe-worthy episode of unwanted affection. Steady description, tonal depersonalization, wry affinities between bodies and machines or bodies and creatures – these attributes comprise a genealogy for modernist inscriptions of affect with a significant legacy for writers today. At the level of narrative discourse, psychologically elaborate and rhetorically lush impressions are either rechanneled into narratorial itemizations of other people (Cusk) or else displaced by episodes of sardonic convulsion (Lewis). In each case, respectively, characters become the subjects of cool, dispassionate inspection and satirically ridiculing, objectifying fascination – inviting, in both instances, our distanced and discomforting captivation rather than tender fellow-feeling. For Cusk’s disturbed readers, as for Lewis’s pummeled audience, these tactics have affective consequences. As one reviewer concluded of Outline: “There’s no one you can root for or even believe in very strongly, and the novel offers few of the standard expected rewards of fiction.” Yet arguably, those rewards have always been up for debate in modernist fiction. And the debate itself, as we have seen, often plays out at the level of style. There the affective vectors of diction, rhythm, syntax, and timbre become integral to fiction’s capacity for deliberative reflection: sometimes elegiac reflections
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on what novels long to rescue from “the flight of time,” as Woolf put it, or alternatively, politically urgent reflections, as we’ll see now by turning to a novel that stringently refuses to furnish the equally “standard,” emotionally self-congratulatory reward of compassion.
Feeling for the Facts, Reading beyond Compassion In her remarkable chronicle of social and existential precarity, A Day Off, Storm Jameson shows what a novel can do when it synchronizes external descriptions of material dispossession and intimately evoked impressions of vulnerability. At first blush, the novel presents us with a somewhat uneventful story of an unnamed middle-aged woman who seeks temporary relief from her own poverty. As a child, she faced interminable labor in a northern mill town; now she has been left bereft in London. Recently rejected by a lover, whose farewell letter greets her toward the close, she decides to “step out into [the streets] from her over-habited room,” opening up a forlorn life to “an adventure, a release of all her senses.” It’s difficult to gauge what Jameson’s heroine desires, as inchoate memories merge with displaced longings. This indistinctness is replicated in the novel’s tenor, captivating us with what Hannah Freed-Thall in another context has called an indeterminate “feeling-tone or mood, rather than a specifiable feeling.” Perambulatory yet often punctured and stalled by forlorn retrospection, A Day Off revolves around an affective disposition that “seems to be searching for its appropriate object.” Or not even an object, but simply alleviation – perhaps some company without expense (even if company has to be imaginary, as we soon discover it to be), or some other self-granted intermission that wouldn’t involve any costs the woman cannot afford. Her daybreak from destitution consists of “pretend[ing] that she was going down to Richmond on the invitation of a friend,” a fictional friend “of about forty” who becomes the subject of a fantasy that soothes and sustains her on the train, where she “half closed her eyes against the sun” in order “to imagine it better” (). The free indirect style that conveys her “familiar excitement” at this mind’s eye affair is interspersed with impassive description, however: we’re informed that the “train lurched, the train stopped, and went on again with a cripple who got in at Baron’s Court and three unemployed men who had heard that there were jobs to be had in the motor works at Gunnersbury” (). If “[n]one of these events were as real to the woman as her thoughts” (), the novel’s restless perspective – switching back and forth from restricted focalization to social
observation – certainly makes them legible for Jameson’s reader. Soon the buffering distance implied between the woman’s cocooning daydream and the precariat who share her carriage dissolves. In one respect, the resulting effect is acutely uncomfortable, as readers assume the objectifying standpoint of fellow passengers who witness how “[a]n imbecile smile crossed her face” as the erotic daydream blooms, and who (in the case of one traveler) end up “looking at her disdainfully” (). Poignantly for us, desperately for her, she deliberately returns this contemptuous gaze as though it was “scarcely worth the trouble of noticing” (). On this reading, we find ourselves participating – by virtue of the narration’s panning back into perceptual impartiality – in the austerity of glances and insinuated judgments that only compound the woman’s insecurity. The distantiating shift from interior impressions to the point of view of reported onlookers formally simulates the exposure to which she is prone. There may, however, be another way to think about this moment of looking and looks returned. If the fantasy’s “sensual pleasure” momentarily detaches Jameson’s woman from those physically disabled and economically dislocated individuals with whom she shares the carriage (and who are offensively designated as such by her focalizing curtness), then that detachment is soon quashed as the narrator draws attention to “the idiot simplicity of our bodies” (), collapsing discriminations between those bodies. As the primacy of the woman’s viewpoint for a moment gives way, Jameson’s unanchored perspective serves to “index,” in Hillary Gravendyk’s terms, the “capacity of embodied perception as it expands beyond any singular focus,” precisely in order to show how precarious or disabled bodies are “not and should not be the exception within our developing models of perception.” When Jameson’s language refuses to recede into her focalizing character’s romantic chimera, the view she subsequently affords might seem impersonal, if not unsympathetic in its detachment. But in fact, this same external view compels the reader to step back and acknowledge that “being-in-a-body in the world is characterized not by experiential and perceptual homogeneity, but by particularity” – including the particularities of the chronically unprotected. “It is only by recognizing that particularity,” argues Gravendyk, “that we can talk about a shared condition.” Jameson would no doubt have agreed with this theorization of affective embodiment and social recognition. Four years after publishing A Day Off, she distilled her compositional priorities in “Documents,” an essay that considers what it means for the “socialist writer” to tackle shared conditions of hardship in an era adjoining modernism’s magisterial excursions
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through the mind. Jameson insisted that novelists need to keep themselves “out of the picture while working ceaselessly to present the fact from a striking (poignant, ironic, penetrating, significant) angle. The narrative must be sharp, compressed, concrete.” Particularity rules. She goes on: “emotion should spring directly from the fact.” When dealing as a writer with the creative and ethical challenges of doing justice to privation, “there is no value in the emotions, the spiritual writhings, started in [the writer] by the sight, smell, and touch of poverty. The emotions are no doubt unavoidable. There is no need to record them.” These assertions help us to make sense of the strategic impersonality and carefully choreographed recessions of perspective throughout A Day Off, whose affective impact may be felt even at a syntactic level. Allow me to glance at one such example in moving now to a close. Still buoyed up by the journey, the woman begins to have the “feeling that she could do almost anything since she had without even a friend to walk with her and sustain her, reached Richmond Park from a bed-sitting-room off the Tottenham Court Road, on the warmest day of the year, and with less than a pound between her and – nothing” (). The parataxis here is charged. As in To the Lighthouse, albeit in an entirely different idiom, the phrasing conjures its very own variety of pathos. Jameson’s list of mundane achievements unfurls into a catalog of miniature compensations that are then abruptly halted by the intervening recognition: life remains on the verge, in stark opposition to a day drenched in summer, an admission that’s bluntly ratified typographically by the isolating en dash. The woman’s upbeat inventory of what she has so far managed to do on this lonely day off is curtailed by grim self-recognition, where “nothing” – financially, domestically, existentially – is all there is to look forward to. Escaping from workaday routine only brings her vulnerabilities into definition, when “[r]egret moved in her, gentle, inescapable, but for what she scarcely now knew” (). If in modernist studies “we often attribute value,” as Jesse Matz puts it, to works that “discredit public temporalities in favor of private, subversive, untimely ones,” then Jameson’s novel alerts us to the tangible, ontologically devastating costs of socioeconomic isolation from public (consumer and leisure) time. If this seems like a thoroughly pitiable situation, Jameson doesn’t let us rest easy with that affective conclusion. She seems to insist that pity’s plenitude should not shield us from the brute facts of poverty she works “ceaselessly to present.” Rather than enunciating a polemic on inequality, A Day Off solicits the reader’s awareness of the uses – and tacitly deceptive
compensations – of compassionate immersion. A Day Off ’s arresting close accentuates just how affectively complicated this solicitation is: She lies there in the darkness, her mind a meeting-place for every kind of event. A multitude of the quick and the dead exist in it. It is exquisitely poised to make her laugh, cry, speak, exult, suffer, and dream. Exactly as the separate parts of her body are held fast in equilibrium until an instant in a not unguessable future. Turning on her back, she makes a loud strangled noise as she breathes. The pulse in her arm lying on the dirty sheet is one of the stages of a mystery. Look once more and you can see how beautiful she is. Poor woman, let her sleep.
Here, the narration shifts into a vigilant present tense and readers find themselves being positioned somewhat uncomfortably as a fellow observers. The implicit coldness of this spectatorial perspective, at once removed yet attentive, is set against, if not superseded by, the final paragraph’s lyrical swell. But it’s a lyricism Jameson deploys in the full knowledge that such elegance – even if it seems like a rhetorical version, a simulation even, of tender care – cannot console with its lexical replenishments the dejection into which events have led us. Furthermore, it soon becomes clear that the perspective is not altogether dispassionate: however externalized it initially feels, it nonetheless draws us in, anticipating Jameson’s culminating instruction to “[l]ook once more.” Inspecting mentation, she enumerates a congeries of feelings, volatile in their unpredictable “multitude,” running the full affective spectrum from dreaming to suffering. Although “exquisitely poised,” the mind of this “[p]oor woman” is thus itself a model of accustomed precariousness – habituated, as she has become, to hope’s fragility amid penury. Partially assuaging for now, her “equilibrium” will pass, and the pointed double negative (ending that fourth sentence) reaffirms how predictably bleak is the “future” toward which she’s already heading. This is surely a modernist moment of feeling – but with a difference. And the difference cannot sufficiently be explained by the fact that Jameson was a socialist writer determined to depart in this day-long novel from iconic precedents set by Woolf and Joyce in that genre. The distinction is compositionally and affectively subtler here. For style itself precipitates emotional reflexivity on the part of A Day Off ’s reader, in ways that reveal a more complex affinity between Jameson and her modernist antecedents than one might expect. In Woolf’s moments of being, any “ripple of irresistible sensation” has the potential to coalescence into some semblance of that “wholeness” she sought to obtain, according to “A Sketch of the
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Past,” by “putting” shock “into words,” by piecing “severed parts together” in order to “take away the pain.” Instead of satiating the aesthetic hunger to “make it whole” in this climactic scene, Jameson foils the moment as an ameliorating unit of amalgamation. The ripple of sensation here coils not into consoling integration but into a striking extradiegetic instruction (“let her sleep”), one that accords with Jameson’s injunction from “Documents”: just as a “photographer does,” so the writer should remove herself from the picture, should purposely extricate her writing from the overwhelming sorrow that may propel it, in order for scenes of poverty to be as socially elucidatory as they are emotionally stirring. Likewise, readers too are urged in the end to keep their pity out of the frame. Even though we’ve been summoned closer for an instant to “look once more,” beyond impoverishment, in order to appreciate this woman’s disregarded beauty, Jameson requests that we then keep our distance too: her closing line affects us both because of insistent content (the imperative admonition) and because of the form that this insistence takes (as an unusual and unexpected interjection). Drawing sudden attention in this way to an instruction that braids emotive content and expressive form, her directive goes so far as to insinuate that this pitiable scene no longer really needs its onlooking reader – or, more precisely, its reader’s compassion. To adapt Lauren Berlant’s account of the politics of compassion and withholding, Jameson appears to “refuse [her] readers the pleasure of learning of social suffering by not asking for fellow feeling” or providing in its place that compensatory “feeling of uplift” which comes from witnessing a character’s “refusal . . . to be defeated by the project of living amidst inequality.” If A Day Off provokes in such “scenes of vulnerability” this surprising and unsettling “desire to withhold compassionate attachment,” then it by no means lets us off the hermeneutic hook. Rather, Jameson asks us to feel our way beyond simply pitying this woman’s “not unguessable future,” to entertain a response instead that’s unconfined to gracious sympathy. A Day Off communicates vulnerability with a vividness that not only disproves the idea that feeling itself, as some theorists have suggested, “appears to hide from representation,” but that also confronts readers with the realization that compassion alone is hardly enough. Although experiences of precarity may conventionally be associated with some “obvious and totalizing” “sea change,” as Kathleen Stewart observes, they can also derive from “the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve.” A Day Off ascertains the emotional consequences of fragile reprieve not only as subject matter but also as an ethical prompt. Issued as stirringly by the novel’s perspectival adjustments as by its unfolding action, this prompt
petitions readers to fathom the implications of their involvement in narratives of exposure and isolation. In this ephemeral, tonally inscrutable interwar novella, an Impressionist concern with the sensory intricacies of perception is supplanted by an externalist commitment to what Jameson called “seizing . . . the significant” in everyday life, but without at all diluting the psychological dimension of the novel’s exploration of poverty’s damage. These alternative strands of affective representation coalesce in ways that help us to discern how style at once supplies a medium for social critique and actively deliberates on the modes through which such critique can be movingly inflected – all the while preempting the sort of fulfillment readers might typically expect from their sympathetic entanglement. If anything, then, what’s felt here is the inescapable potential of style to generate thought in its own right.
Notes Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (), in Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, ), . Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, ), . Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –, . Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), xi. Marta Figlerowicz, Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), . Julie Taylor, “Introduction: Modernism and Affect,” in Modernism and Affect, ed. Julie Taylor (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . Paul Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” in “Weak Theory,” special issue, Modernism/modernity . (), . Ibid., . Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative,” PMLA . (), (my emphasis). See also Janet Lyon’s introduction to “Disability and Generative Form,” a special issue of Journal of Modern Literature . (), v–viii; and Michael Davidson, Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, ), . Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke
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University Press, ), . Laura Frost offers an invigorating reconsideration of the “art of unpleasure” in the interwar period in The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), (Lazarus’s emphasis). Ibid., . Santanu Das, India, Empire, and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), , , . Sarah Cole, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Paul Saint-Amour also offers a virtuosic account of the anticipation of violence in states of “perpetual interwar” in Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, ). Figlerowicz, Spaces of Feeling, . Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique (Autumn ), . Ibid., . Ibid., , . Ibid., . Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Margaret Drabble (; Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Virginia Woolf, Monday July, . The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. , –, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (London: Hogarth, ), . Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), . Virginia Woolf, : To Roger Fry, May , , in A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. , –, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Hogarth, ), . Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” . Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Derek Attridge, The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), , . Rei Terada prefers to tease the concepts apart, arguing that “by emotion we usually mean a psychological, at least minimally interpretive experience whose physiological aspect is affect,” whereas feeling remains “a capacious term that connotes both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions).” Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, . Jesse Matz, “Pseudo-Impressionism?,” in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), . Surveying Impressionism’s literary afterlives, Matz observes that “[m]ost fiction now shifts perspectives, withholds judgement and conjures immediacy, mainstreaming an Impressionism free of its original scepticism, alienation and anxiety” (–). Ian McEwan, interview by Zadie Smith, The Believer (August ), ; Adam Begley, “Ian McEwan: The Art of Fiction,” in Conversations with Ian McEwan, ed. Ryan Roberts (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), . I have considered elsewhere the extent to which Atonement is actually in closer conversation with the affective potential of the very Impressionism it seems to disavow: see David James, Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Wyndham Lewis, “Satire and Fiction,” in Enemy Pamphlets No. (London: The Arthur Press, n.d.), . Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, ), . Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art, ed. Seamus Cooney (; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, ), , . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Lewis, Time and Western Man, . Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Wyndham Lewis, “Long Live the Vortex!,” Blast (), . Wyndham Lewis, “Vortices and Notes,” Blast (), . Wyndham Lewis, Tarr, ed. Scott Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Wyndham Lewis, “Inferior Religions” (), in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, ), . Wyndham Lewis, “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” in The Complete Wild Body, (my emphasis). Rachel Cusk, Outline (; London: Vintage, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Julie Myerson, review of Outline, by Rachel Cusk, The Guardian online, September , , www.theguardian.com/books//sep//outline-reviewrachel-cusk-daring-greek-chorus. Storm Jameson, A Day Off (), reprinted in A Day Off: Two Novels and Some Short Stories (London: Macmillan, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Despite teaching us so much about the poetics and politics of feeling, as my discussion hopes to suggest, Jameson’s work rarely plays a prominent part in current stories of modernism. The recuperative ventures that so valuably propelled scholarship on early twentieth-century women’s fiction several decades ago evidently remain vital, urgent, and far from
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complete – even if one of the many things such writers make clear is that recuperation is only just the beginning. Hannah Freed-Thall, Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Hillary Gravendyk, “Chronic Poetics,” in “Disability and Generative Form,” special issue, Journal of Modern Literature . (), , . Ibid., . Storm Jameson, “Documents,” Fact (July ), (Jameson’s emphases). Ibid., . Jesse Matz, “Modernist Time Ecology,” Modernist Cultures . (), . For this passage, I am referring to the version as it appears in A Day Off (London: Remploy, ), –. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Grafton, ), . Jameson, “Documents,” . Lauren Berlant, “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding),” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Berlant (London: Routledge, ), . Ibid., . Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, . Kathleen Stewart, “Precarity’s Forms,” Cultural Anthropology . (), . Jameson, “Documents,” .
Invisibility’s Arts The Seen and the Unseen in Modernism and Modernist Studies Sarah Cole Here is a fact that has been little, or perhaps never, noted: the literary period traditionally designated as modernist begins and ends with two novels about invisible men, H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man () and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (), published exactly fifty years apart. Ellison’s novel certainly alludes to its predecessor in its title, tapping into the vast cultural recognition of that novella, which had a phenomenal reach. Wells’s bodiless figure, with his intriguing non-being, had made a commotion in its novelistic and filmic settings (the first film adaptation, directed by James Whale, was released in , while earlier films based more loosely on Wells’s book had abounded). But more striking is how dissimilar these texts are, and how little they would seem to have to do with each other, which may account for the near silence on their connection in the critical literature. Wells’s account of literal invisibility, in an often comic story of small-town, would-be terror eventually defeated by the community, appears to inhabit a different atmosphere altogether from Ellison’s twentieth-century Harlem anti-epic, a modernist masterpiece whose nameless narrator is driven underground by the material forces of racial hostility, extreme violence, and mind-boggling hypocrisy and cynicism. I propose, however, that these two works are linked precisely by their complex analysis of invisibility. To consider how invisibility might operate as a pivotal critical concept opens up not only this singular connection but a broader web of intertwined forces and topics, and reveals some of the ways that technology, social status, race, science, and power were often thought about together in this period, at a level just under the surface. Invisibility – as fantasy, goal, and metaphysical conundrum – is an old fetish in Western literary culture. It begins with Homer’s gods at the outset of the canon, who regularly grant forms of invisibility to their favorites, as an aid in war, conquest, homecoming, or sexual transgression, and moves all the way to Tolkien’s ring or Harry Potter’s cloak, iconic and central features in these series that often traffic in more complex forms of magic.
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The simple cloak or ring granting invisibility: this reiterated prop within fantastic literature channels a dense array of phantasmatic and cognitive projects. Literary interest in the unseen is robust in other, less literal ways, of course, with the interior life of the mind representing a certain form of radical invisibility, and hence, in a sense, the very subject of the modern novel. As the example of the interior life of the mind suggests, modernism has a special affiliation with invisibility. As a key term, it could invite a variety of seemingly disparate topics suddenly to jump into relation, as they cohere, jostle, interconnect, and reflect back and forth on one another; yet it has never occupied such a position. If the new modernist studies has not followed the line from one invisible man to the next, that is, it may be because invisibility itself has been a missing term in our critical idiom. While we cannot quite affirm as a neat irony that invisibility is itself invisible – critics in several key areas, notably media studies, visual culture, and race studies in the United States have addressed it – it has not been recognized as a linking principle that provides critical glue across genres and contexts. In this short piece, accordingly, invisibility is reintroduced into the new modernist studies, neither a keyword nor a complete surprise, but rather a way to realign some primary interests and issues. Affiliations around invisibility might reveal new directions in modernist studies. Take, for instance, Noam Elcott’s work on “artificial darkness,” which examines the use and meaning of darkness (as distinct from light and color) in visual culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Invisibility becomes a rich concept within this history not solely as a filmic trick that achieved a certain vogue in the early decades of the century but also as another expression of what Elcott recognizes as a new way to think and produce darkness, the absence or cancellation of the visible. “By the late nineteenth century,” Elcott writes, “darkness was controlled in a series of complementary sites.. . . These sites for the production and perception of images formed circuits of darkness that helped shape modern art, modern media, and their subjects.” Elcott’s book, which has garnered significant interest, stands at a busy crossroads where art history, media studies, and modernist studies intersect, and we might see his work on darkness as helping to nudge these alliances into closer proximity. Or, to name another adjacent area around which the invisible becomes generative, at the Modern Language Association convention, a panel titled “Shadowtime,” sponsored by the Society of Novel Studies (itself a relatively new association), asked whether there is a productive idea in the notion of “shadowtime” as a way to express the simultaneity of ordinary
and anthropocenic temporalities. The idea of anthropocenic time is bound to the issue of invisibility, since this is how massive ecological and climatic change transpires: initially outside of human perception, ultimately inescapable and catastrophic. Shadowtime is offered as a figure for a variety of experiences that follow from the irruption of comprehension, visibility, or sentience into our consciousness, with respect to the enormous forces of climate change – what one knows to be determining our collective future, yet which one cannot detect through ordinary sensory experience. As the examples of artificial darkness and anthropocenic temporality indicate, modernity and invisibility may be closely bonded, particularly insofar as modernity stakes many of its claims to exceptionalism around technologies, sensibilities, and forms of knowledge that specifically involve access to realms outside the bounds of ordinary apprehension. Most clearly, two arenas of technological development in the mid- to late nineteenth century are germane to the way the modernist imagination came to circle around invisibility, and these have received ample attention in the new modernist studies: the invention and expansion of microscopes and telescopes and the advent of radio. Critics have considered the centrality of radio to modernism since the publication of Todd Avery’s Radio Modernism, which established an intricate tie between Bloomsbury and radio, and with important works by Mark Goble, Sam Halliday, and others demonstrating how fully radio penetrated the imaginative life of the period. More recently, Emily Bloom, in The Wireless Past, considers how radio plays themselves can be viewed as formally modernist productions, as well as influencing works and writers in other genres. These scholarly works differ in emphasis, but share a primary understanding that the spread of radio fundamentally altered people’s sense of space, time, and duration, with disembodied voices offering vistas for aesthetic, as well as political or journalistic, innovation. In similar terms, the invention and popularization of microscopes (which bring to visibility those objects that are too small to view with the unaided eye) and telescopes (where the objects are too far away) charged the imagination not only of scientists but also of artists, as they found innumerable possibilities in these radical sightlines. As Holly Henry writes with respect to Virginia Woolf, “as a new generation of astronomical telescopes in the early decades of the twentieth century opened up new vistas of space, popular audiences were awed by the immensity and seeming lifelessness of the universe.. . . Woolf read the work of these scientists and began developing literary strategies that responded to this re-scaling.” And Cóilín Parsons notes more broadly that “astronomical
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telescopes offer a glimpse of the sublime, but they are also material objects that are bought and sold and circulated around the world, carrying with them meanings that exceed their limited brief.. . . The astronomical telescope is a key structure of feeling for global modernity.” One could add other developments to this list, involving, for instance, new scientific paradigms in physics, whereby the atomic scale began to reveal itself as a site of astonishing and counterintuitive processes. These technological and scientific innovations work their way into modernism according to several principles, including an essential question of the enlargement versus diminishment of the human being. It is a persistent dialectic: the aggrandizement that scientific progress lends to those doing the perceiving; the reminder of the immense scale of the universe, in space as well as time, which dwarfs the perceiver. H. G. Wells’s works often operate along this axis. The Invisible Man probes the question of what kind of force a single person can gain through the manipulation of scientific possibility. The dream begins as that of experiment, fueled by a kind of wonder: “To do such a thing,” thinks Griffin, the novel’s invisible man, “would be to transcend magic.. . . The mystery, the power, the freedom.” But it shifts ineluctably to that of just one of these terms, power: to be able to see others while oneself unseen promises an excess of sovereignty, figured in political terms (a situation Griffin hopes will offer him total control over the small towns where he aims to set up a new “reign of terror”). The story itself checks that violent dream within its narrative, at the same time linking it up to a more persistent goal of stealth, a fantasy that runs throughout Western cultures’ attitudes to war. More broadly, modernism slowly becomes attuned to the fact that as modern political regimes solidify, any individual may not actually be the seer, only the seen. This is the profound insight of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other texts that consider totalitarianism from both outside and inside. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, any belief in individual subjectivity is delusion, “a boot stamping on a human face, for ever,” as O’Brien sums it up toward the end of his extensive torture and re-education campaign against Winston. Poor Winston – believing that he can be unseen, believing even that his thoughts are his own private matter, invisible and sovereign. This aspect of modernism was ready for Foucault, testifying to the panopticon as the primary modern arrangement of power relations. If Discipline and Punish seems not to stand entirely at the center of the new modernist studies, Foucault’s insights into governmentality and biopower have inspired scholars in recent decades, producing a vibrant wing of modernist scholarship.
Invisibility, then, works its way from fantasy to delusion; at the same time, what about those who have always been cut out of visibility, those millions who are socially, sexually, racially, and geographically invisible? Here the new modernist studies takes a variety of tacks, though it should be said that these different varieties of invisibility (social/racial/sexual invisibility versus the technological and other prospects noted earlier) are rarely thought about together. Ellison wrote the book on American racial invisibility, and in recent decades the question of how bodies are rendered mute or outside of cultural legibility has occupied scholars, especially in queer theory and in studies of race and injustice (Judith Butler’s term “ungrievable” is one such notation). One powerful impulse is to bring such bodies and lives into view, to tell their stories; this is the imperative to unearth or, in the many cases where this is never fully possible, to imagine worlds for those cut out of history and narrative. Saidiya Hartman’s exquisite Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments picks up on a scholarly tradition that places new stories, voices, and bodies at the center of interest, and creates the template for future work. Hartman’s book, published by Norton and speaking to an audience beyond academia, engages, as its initial and ongoing gesture, with a form of excessive visibility in the photographs of black girls from the early twentieth century that Hartman found in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Some of these portraits suggest sexual exploitation or even sex work; all of them gesture, in Hartman’s view, toward worlds and beings utterly lost to history. The work of her book is to restore them to a life that, certainly, can only ever be imaginative, despite her painstaking research. It is a profoundly contradictory task: to undo a certain false visibility and return to these girls something else, a form of expression that, in Hartman’s view, was theirs to begin with. “They refused the terms of visibility imposed upon them,” she writes of these young women. “They eluded the frame and remained fugitives – lovely silhouettes and dark shadows impossible to force into the grid of naturalist description or the taxonomy of slum pictures.” Wayward Lives suggests a direction in which modernist studies might travel as it sifts and searches for what has been missing in our narratives, including in the rediscovery of those well below the range of the visible (or differently, those whose visibility in one aspect has rendered them invisible in all others). It is a project deeply affiliated with queer theory, though in all such cases, one retains a certain caution, an appropriate suspicion of the light shining into its safe spaces, which so often ushers in the police raid or the pogrom. If one major thrust of queer liberation has been to release people
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from the closet, to illuminate queer lives as part of full historical and contemporary narratives, visibility is no panacea; the parade is critical, but so too is the need for privacy, a firewall against the violence that constantly threatens these communities. Rather, given the emphasis on plurality and a field-wide refusal of gender binaries, queer theory thrives on the threshold, in a continual refusal either to submit to complete visibility, as in the surveillance state, or to consign itself to hiding. One venture that we might undertake, then, in developing a corner of the field around the concept of invisibility, is to recognize the need for differing and shifting valences accruing to the goal of rendering visible whatever has been left out of the cultural fold. Such modulation follows, too, from an ecological perspective. Ecocriticism begins, in some essential ways, with the same imperative that inaugurated the modern environmental movement, to find new systems to measure ecological damage. From Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring () to Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (), we recognize that our senses need radical re-attunement to measure what we cannot see. One thinks of Richard Powers’s stunning novel The Overstory (), which tells the story of trees, those immensely complex and astonishingly aged beings always at the wrong end of the saw or the clearing operation. When the headlights flood into the forest, you know what is coming next. But the light of the clandestine nighttime clearing operation should not be confused with actual seeing. “No one sees trees,” writes the novel’s own tree-writer, “We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade.. . . But trees – trees are invisible.” In that novel, to see trees in the first place is to have one’s orientation realigned. The reader, along with a roster of the book’s characters, is taught to look, to see, to differentiate, to study, to appreciate. The last stage is to wish to give. But returning to modernism: the two invisible-man novels that bookend its chronology open up many of these dynamics from within. Wells’s The Invisible Man (), itself all but invisible in the critical narrative of modernism, shares with his canon more broadly a few key preoccupations that touch on how invisibility might already be shaping the new modernist studies: the soaring potentiality and false promise of science, a propensity to play with visuality at multiple levels, and a willingness to cut through literary figuration and literalize our key cultural metaphors. This last is a signature Wellsian move: in The Time Machine, the trope of two cultures (upper and lower classes) becomes literalized over eight hundred thousand years of evolution, in the form of two distinct and mutually dependent species; in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the Victorian idea of
“making men” takes on garish reality, as people are physically carved out from animals, though vivisection; “The Country of the Blind” creates a city and community inhabited by people who are actually, not metaphorically, blind. Every one of these scenarios combines exhilaration with horror, aiming to challenge Victorian culture at its base. It’s more than a neat trick of language. Boring into the heart of our metaphors challenges belief. It is meant to be raw, and to force an uncomfortable reckoning with the deep content that these figures of speech conceal. And similarly with invisibility: when Griffin, the novel’s protagonist (if that is the right term for him, a thoroughly unlikable scientist whose story forms the central kernel of this sensational tale), finds the exact chemical process to render himself invisible and watches his body disappear under the machine he invented for the purpose, he unleashes a wild unraveling of first principles. These principles are essential to matters of identity and have ontological consequences, such as: the body is matter, it can be seen, it can be assessed, it bears qualities of the person whom it . . . encases? Is? There’s the rub of course: the nature of materialism. Yet The Invisible Man happily sweeps aside both the truisms and the deep Western conundrums around the nature of the material body (“It is so much easier not to believe in an Invisible Man,” the narrator notes), instead setting before us the visual of a man whose body cannot be seen (IM, ). Or rather, it can only be seen in relation to something else, his own seeming substance a product of what sits adjacent to it. In terms of spectatorship, what allures is precisely the view of invisibility as cast by other objects. When the villagers see a sleeve that is empty, or a ripped pantleg covering nothing, or best of all a disappearing head, as bandages are unwrapped, leaving an apparently headless body, there is the thrill. These are the fun parts for readers and film-viewers, met within the story by the terrifying, slow attunement of the community to Griffin’s actual invisibility. The invisible, it turns out, presents according to a deconstructive logic. It is only legible, and indeed perhaps only interesting, in relation to what one does see: sleeve, neckline, or, in another scenario, a bloody towel, where the body’s materiality, once transferred to a material object, can be seen. Or consider the problem of mud, snow, and the dirty air of London, all of which betray Griffin’s presence. A close corollary is found in the other senses, notably sound, manipulated very expertly by Griffin for his terroristic purpose, in the form of his voice, and touch, his physical aggression against others, either directly with punches, kicks, and the like, or using chairs and other objects as his weapons. This particular setup, where the unseen body employs weapons (or in some cases weaponizes
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ordinarily benign items, like doors and windows) in a tale that becomes increasingly focused on these eruptions, epitomizes perhaps the key point about invisibility: its seemingly inexorable orientation toward escalating violence. This is, indeed, the key trajectory. Invisibility, it seems, yields only violence (and fairly petty violence in many cases) because its only utility is power. Why, in fact, does anyone wish to become invisible? To elude detection or capture; to commit crimes; to win wars. As Philip Ball notes drily, “invisibility will tempt us toward three things: power, sex and murder. This is the promise that has lured people to seek invisibility throughout time.” Griffin’s plan is to set up a form of political tyranny, in which he will possess total control. Here is how he presents it to Kemp, the novel’s Wellsian stand-in (there is one in every text), at that midway moment when, true to genre, Griffin tells his tale: “We have to consider all that invisibility means, all that it does not mean. . . . This invisibility, in fact, is only good in two cases: It’s useful in getting away, it’s useful in approaching. It’s particularly useful, therefore, in killing. I can walk round a man, whatever weapon he has, choose my point, strike as I like.. . .” And a few lines later, “The point is, they know there is an Invisible Man – as well as we know there is an Invisible Man. And that Invisible Man . . . must now establish a Reign of Terror. Yes – no doubt it’s startling. But I mean it. A Reign of Terror. He must take some town like your Burdock and terrify and dominate it. He must issue his orders. He can do that in a thousand ways – scraps of paper thrust under doors would suffice. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them” (IM, –). These are extraordinary statements. In conjoining the terroristic fantasies of the later nineteenth century, which often figured single antagonists creating inordinate chaos, with the French Revolution, and in anticipation of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Griffin figures an overlapping between individual, singular instances of terror with the wider, organized, structure of mass violence. And notice the emphasis on that word “must.” In this he looks ahead to another of Wells’s speculations about the fantasy of incommensurate power, The War in the Air (), in which the ability to bomb from above is figured – in riveting detail – as the culminating point in modern warfare. The war begins with a great German air fleet, whose sudden appearance over a warship or city represents the most overt configuration of total power. Once the world goes to war, such superiority is no longer located in a single dominating unit, but that initial picture of power above and subjection below dramatically isolates the full history (and future) of a key configuration, one-directional, total supremacy in war.
This is the long-standing military goal of stealth, to be able to attack the enemy without being seen. We might note the strangeness of Book X of the Iliad, when Odysseus and Diomedes seem to break every code of Homeric warfare (such as the public aggrandizing of the warrior and the intertwining of spectacular warfare with family, history, and art), instead sneaking by night into the Trojan camp and committing mass murder of their sleeping enemies. What reads like a distinctively anomalous strain in Homer replays itself in the real world over centuries, as with the endlessly updated stealth bomber as mainstay of the American military, or with drones in our contemporary era. There has been no pause in pursuing the possibility of waging war invisibly. In the case of drones, it is really the human pilot, rather than the craft, which is invisible, the pilot’s distance from the scene of bombing seeming to culminate in the goal of onedimensional warfare, where only one side can be endangered. What, though, differentiates this principle – of a single being or weapon controlling another polity through sheer force of its existence – from terrorism? For Wells in The Invisible Man (and also in The War in the Air), the answer is nothing. These are identical dreams, and both are rushed into possibility by science and by its critical subset, the development of weapons. In the case of The Invisible Man, it is not difficult to see how his discovery of a breakthrough chemical procedure can be turned directly into an instrument for violent control of one over many – though for Griffin, disillusionment comes quickly. “The more I thought it over,” he muses, “the more I realized what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was – in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded, civilized city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages” (IM, ). Tethered to fantasies of singular and violent domination, invisibility tends to disappoint those with dreams of domination, instead engulfing everyone in the spread of destruction, across a wider and wider span (the countryside of Sussex in The Invisible Man, the world in The War in the Air). With this reminder that invisibility becomes quickly tangled in disproportionate dynamics of power and violence, one jumps half a century to Ellison’s novel. Ellison may not be inventing machines to render one’s pigment and tissue invisible, but the connection among visibility, invisibility, power, and science is at once strong and consequential in the novel. Take, as a case in point, the sequence in the paint factory and hospital, which dramatizes in especially troubling fashion how the specific apparatus of modern science contributes to the white supremacy of America, here in a factory that is, after all, fabricating a varnish (and one of questionable durability at that). It would seem a good space for the mordant
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deconstructing of the notion of racial meaning, but more affecting is to recognize how the factory participates in larger dynamics of racial violence. The dystopic sequence in which the narrator is imprisoned in the supermodern hospital/laboratory (or what the narrator confusedly learns is a “factory hospital”) is harrowing, and taps into a larger tradition (from both before and after Invisible Man) that sees the science lab as a critical location for diagnosing the worst excesses of Western power regimes. Science never stands outside of other aspects of the social world, and this sequence presents an extension and implementation of the racist capitalism the novel exposes all throughout its settings. Steeped in these conjunctures, Invisible Man dramatizes, for instance, the continued presence of racial pseudoscience, beginning in the South, but by no means limited to those locales. It would be difficult, in other words, to take any aspect of Ellison’s story as outside of the grip of white power, which manifests differently in its various institutions and political formations, including those where science is incubated and deployed. In Wells’s novel, it is Griffin’s gambit and great experiment to make himself invisible; but fifty years later, Ellison reveals the principle of social invisibility to sit at the swirling center of power and disempowerment, of alienation and self-assertion. The novel’s penetrating analysis of social and racial invisibility centers on questions of how the white supremacist system makes, unmakes, names, and renames the disempowered. To be visible or invisible cannot be imagined as the daring project of a single individual. Or can it? When the never-named narrator inaugurates his book with the canonical statement “I am an invisible man,” and when, hundreds of pages later, he has reached the site of his elected, underground invisibility, he seems to throw the social forces that have so powerfully assaulted him back on themselves (“boomerang” is one word he uses), declaring that “after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I have finally rebelled. I am an invisible man” (Ellison, IM, , italics in original). One wonders whether there is a difference between the “invisible” and “invisible” of the first and last chapters, whether, that is, the novel charts a curve of invisibility that moves from simply being invisible, a product of the wider culture’s inability to see a black man in his full humanity, to becoming, which might instead be a matter of will and agency. “He’s invisible,” says the veteran savant of the narrator, in the long early sequence at the Golden Day, “a walking personification of the Negative” (Ellison, IM, ). And the novel will work its way through and around this proposition. “What did they ever think of us transitory ones?” the narrator asks himself, “. . . birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent
for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents? We who write no novels, histories or other books. What about us . . . .” (Ellison, IM, ). It is hard to see any way in which Invisible Man answers these stinging questions. The narrator’s final glorying in his status as transitory, obscure, silent, and, ultimately, outside of history is less likely to return the invisible to a line of sight than to find its meaning in parody and appropriation. Even if there is, lodged within the novel’s prospects of invisibility, an idea of ultimately owning one’s own social and racial erasure, still it remains crystal clear that the being invisible dramatized through most of the novel is marked through and through by violence, and specifically violence against the black body. Back in the prologue, when the narrator announces his invisibility, the anecdote he uses to exemplify the phenomenon involves him nearly killing a white man on the street, the culmination of a racist affront from the man. And the novel proper begins with a sequence that must be fixed in any reader’s memory, the battle royal, a scene of intense violence against young black men, in a kind of orgy of sensory, psychological, and physical assault. That the young men are pitted against one another does little to mask the actual power dynamics of the fight. Similarly, the police killing of Brother Clifton, in a sequence that resonates especially powerfully today, in the context of police killings of young black men and the Black Lives Matter movement, involves the shocking and gratuitous murder of a young black man, where the novel’s questions about what it means to be visible/invisible again resolve into a horrific spectacle of violence against this body. Clifton’s bodily contortions in death are repeated in the narrator’s mind, a form of slow-motion reenactment that helps to catalyze his disillusionment. Clifton’s crime, it seems, was to deconstruct the national history of racial impersonation through his dancing Sambo doll. In all of these cases, and much more broadly in the novel, Ellison engages a dialectic between surfaces and depths, where the meaning of “race” is sent on a constant looping trip between legibility and illegibility, what one can see and what one can’t, always though with the further repercussion that these misrecognitions play out in intense forms of violence and disenfranchisement (also note the connection here with the theme of blindness, given literal shape in Brother Jack’s glass eye, an object that helps to pinpoint the particular shortcomings not only of Jack himself but of the whole Brotherhood).
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What both invisible man novels dramatize is that the idea of invisibility only becomes meaningful in the context of what can be seen, that it is the interplay between these two seemingly oppositional conditions that tricks and traps us, giving potency to our biases and hardening our commonplaces into vicious social conditions. Neither novel is interested in essence, in the idea that there might be some substantive reality of what is or is not visible; both are intensely interested in thinking out the consequences of these oscillating states, each mode giving sentient reality to the other. Both novels, again, recognize that invisibility is desired or granted only for purposes of violence and power, or, in the case of Ellison’s narrator, resistance and self-preservation in relation to violence and power. This is a novel, after all, in which each and every effort at color blindness or racial equality is revealed to be, rather, a continuation and extension of extreme racial difference and inequality. In setting Wells and Ellison as entry-points – into and out of modernism, into and out of Victorian and cold-war literary eras – one notices how these insights about the deep connection between power and visibility characterize many other works written throughout this half century. In fact, the sheer mass of unseen presences that crowd modernism seems, in such a light, to be another instance of this dynamic between the visible and invisible, adding another dimension to the familiar modernist obsession with the past and with death. “One by one they were all becoming shades,” thinks Gabriel Conroy, in the sublime closing of Joyce’s “The Dead.” “His soul approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.” How do these flickering presences change in the light cast by the before and after pictures of invisible men? The cognitive space of fade, waywardness, and flicker picks up such diverse associations as Hartman’s wayward lives, or the untimely way that trees disrupt our ordinary temporal assumptions, or that those who live constantly on the threshold of racial invisibility might be seen to inhabit a gray, impalpable world. Gabriel himself seems to be caught in the crux of a variety of dichotomous propositions (past/present, Ireland/England) and these questions of what remains hidden or inexplicable trouble his consciousness throughout the story. One need not map these different attentions to invisibility too closely or too literally, of course. What matters is to recognize that the emphasis in modernism on states and spaces of uncertain materiality and substance, which range from these dead to, say,
Virginia Woolf’s airy presences in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, or E. M. Forster’s ghosts and hallucinations in A Passage to India, or Yeats’s experiments with vision, carries with it diverse overtones and affiliations. To say that it starts with science (Wells) and ends with race (Ellison) would be too simple; instead, it starts and ends with efforts to take seriously and to take apart the gaps between what we can and what we cannot declare with certainty to be present, or to be real. The play with invisibility is not, in fact, terribly playful; it scrutinizes concepts and constructs that can be powerful cultural determinants, and, as such, are often most likely to remain outside of view. Perhaps, too, these dynamics help to explain another modernist fantasy, of the invisibility (or impersonality, or detachment) of the author. Invisibility, then, might best be considered a modernist keyword, but a minor one, in the line of what Paul Saint-Amour has termed, in an influential special issue of Modernism/modernity, the “weak” theoretical strain in modernism. As he writes, weak theorists “draw attention to obsolete epistemologies, to actions unpremised on self-possession, to creative practices unendorsed by the portrait of the author as lone master builder. And they issue an invitation . . . to theorize from weakness as a condition endowed with traits and possibilities of its own.” The visible/ invisible dialectic has weak-theoretical implications in the way it refuses to assert an overriding theoretical directive, instead offering connecting threads and suggestive ties across multiple texts and contexts. Invisibility is that kind of concept, simultaneously unassertive and, once recognized, potentially reorienting. It points us to some of the most pressing and recalcitrant issues in the first half of the twentieth century (and still today) – around race, violence, privilege, war, and science – and also to some of modernism’s favorite aesthetic and cultural sources of inspiration and consolation – around experiment, the ability to transgress time and space, the possibility of retreat and privacy, and, again, science. The philosopher Oliver Mu¨ller argues, following Hans Blumenberg, that being visible is the essential feature of human experience and community (tracing this back to the difference between humans and our ancestors, with their ape-like posture, where the ability to walk upright means that one can, at the literal level, be seen rising above the surroundings). Modernism is always interested in those potentialities that challenge a culture’s base assumptions – and also its prohibitions and requirements – at the root. Small wonder, then, that its literature was drawn magnetically and perhaps inevitably to a realm that seems to elude definition in the first place. Or put it this way: try asking an adult which superpower he/she
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would take, flight or invisibility; in most cases, I think your grownup will say “flight.” But ask a child and you will get “invisibility.” Modernism is like that child. It is drawn, in the end, toward forms of magic that don’t really allow us to soar out of our worlds, but rather help us to reexperience them in all of their complex intransigence.
Notes See Robert S. Fleissner, “H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison: Need the Effect of One Invisible Man on Another Be Itself Invisible?,” Extrapolation . (), –. Fleissner argues that Ellison’s novel is, indeed, indebted to Wells’s. As in the present essay, an effort to link together two seemingly disparate novels around the idea of invisibility, hoping thereby to show how the invisible becomes a useful term in crossing disciplinary reading styles, is Sam Reese and Alexandra Kingston-Reese, “Teju Cole and Ralph Ellison’s Aesthetics of Invisibility,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal . (), –. Similar is the absolute centrality of the ring in Tolkien’s trilogy (plus The Hobbit), where nothing less than world mastery is at stake in reclaiming a ring whose other primary quality is the invisibility it confers upon its wearer. For discussion of race as a foundation for modernist form in Britain, see Urmila Seshagiri, Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: Chicago University Press, ), . See, for instance, Todd Avery, Radio Modernism: Literature, Ethics, and the BBC: – (Aldershot: Ashgate, ); Emily C. Bloom, The Wireless Past: Anglo-Irish Writers and the BBC, – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty, eds., Broadcasting Modernism (Jacksonville: University of Florida Press, ); Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ); and Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, ). Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Cóilín Parsons, “Planetary Parallax: ‘Ulysses,’ the Stars and South Africa,” Modernism/modernity . (), . H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Cited hereafter in text as IM. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, ), . Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, ), .
These issues are central to the field, and therefore too numerous to reference. One work that directly addresses issues of visibility and the body, in the context of performance, is Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, ). Richard Powers, The Overstory (London: Heinemann, ), ; italics in original. For a brief discussion of how Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is a key precursor for Ellison (no mention of Wells), see Philip Weinstein, “Postmodern Intimations: Musing on Invisibility: William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison,” in Faulkner and Postmodernism, ed. John N. Duvall and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –. For discussion of materialism in The Invisible Man, see Michael Fried, What Was Literary Impressionism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. Philip Ball, Invisible: The Dangerous Lure of the Unseen (London: Bodley Head, ), . Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, ), . Cited hereafter in text as Ellison, IM. James Joyce, “The Dead,” in Dubliners (New York: Penguin, ), –. Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” in “Weak Theory,” special issue, Modernism/modernity . (), –. Oliver Mu¨ller, “Being Seen: An Exploration of a Core Phenomenon of Human Existence and Its Normative Dimensions,” Human Studies . (), –, published online June , .
Black Writing’s Visuals African American Modernism in Nugent, Ligon, and Rankine Miriam Thaggert The use of images in Citizen is meant in part to destabilize the text so both image and text would always have possibilities, both realized and unimagined.. . . I was interested in how the dynamic of intertextuality differently energizes a text. This resonates partly because I feel that the entrance of the black body works like that in the American landscape.
—Claudia Rankine, “How Art Teaches a Poet to See” ()
The study of African American modernism, traditionally associated with the s or the period known as the Harlem Renaissance, tightly intersects with visual culture. But what is the trajectory, the movement, from the study of visual culture of the New Negro Movement to the study of work in our more contemporary period? This essay examines the changing significance of visual culture in African American modernism from the New Negro era to our current moment in modernist studies. To exemplify this visual and verbal trajectory, I begin with a relatively under-studied short story of the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” to note the way it narratively visualizes a modernism evocative of the New Negro period. I then look at more contemporary literary and visual figures who, together, express the complexity of a new black modernist subjectivity. The visual artist Glenn Ligon intimately links his art to important African American modernist literature; specifically, his stenciled text-based paintings reshape such classic works of black modern subjectivity as Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (), Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (), and James Baldwin’s essay “Stranger in a Village” (), among others. Claudia Rankine’s ground-breaking and award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric () traces the subtle psychical and physical effects of everyday racialized encounters commonly referred to as “microaggressions,” a term that ineffectively captures the potentially traumatic weight of repetitive racial slights.
Incorporating not only poetry but also visual art, such as Ligon’s text paintings, Citizen disrupts traditional literary and artistic boundaries. I argue that both Ligon and Rankine are exemplary of the innovative imagining of a current black modernist self. In my previous work, I defined African American literary modernism as narrative that engages with visual elements to reconstruct assumptions about the African American body. I argued that a form of the black body emerges from the tensions between the material and the intangible – from the corporeal materiality evoked by stereotypical representations of blackness, such as “Negro” dialect, and the ephemerality of some forms of black expression, such as the spirituals. Both language and visual art, specifically photography, can rupture stereotypes of blackness common during the Harlem Renaissance. In identifying how black modernism of that period in the twentieth century appears in the twenty-first, I am attracted to the work of Ligon and Rankine who, in their respective mediums, figure black subjectivity and question how we use images and language to construct meaning and to render the African American body, as well as the violence sometimes wielded against that body. In the s, African American artists and intellectuals used language and visual images to rupture stereotypical images of African Americans. Here, I ask what happens when, as in the case of Ligon, African American narrative is reformed into visual art in a process one can call the inverse of ekphrasis, traditionally defined as the verbal description of a piece of art or sculpture within a literary narrative. In a type of reversal, Ligon’s paintings select words from literary texts and depict the words as visual art on a variety of objects – canvas, doors, even a punching bag. Language, in other words, becomes physical, visual art in Ligon’s text paintings. What alterations – of the text, of the image – take place when this movement from language to image occurs? In exploring this question, I build on scholarship published within the first decade of the twentyfirst century that examined the visual culture of the New Negro Movement as well as more recent work in African American literary and cultural criticism that exemplifies the power of studying the collaborative effect of images and narratives. These studies use a range of methods to examine visuality and narrative in the period: Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, for example, details clothing and the appearance of the mixed-race female subject; Anne Carroll explains the function of illustrations and book covers of significant black fiction of the s; and Mary Ann Calo contextualizes the relationships between visual artists and intellectuals such as Alain Locke.
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Some familiar criticisms of the New Negro Movement targeted its emphasis on literature and its tendency toward a middle-class insularity, its relative lack of political engagement with what Langston Hughes celebrated as the “low down common folk.” Though the movement also included other artforms, the literature of the s has overshadowed other fields vibrant during that time. Today’s African American modernism is less likely to draw rigid lines between the verbal and the visual and presents a more explicit engagement with current political concerns. Both Ligon, citing Hurston, and Rankine, citing Ligon, narrativize and visualize the complexity of a “new” black modernism. The images and texts collaboratively utilized by Ligon and Rankine convey the subjectivity of the twenty-first-century Afro-modern.
Nugent: Material “Smoke” “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” occupies an important, if scandalous, presence in Harlem Renaissance literature. Richard Bruce Nugent’s short story revolves around a young man, Alex, who is in love with two people, a man and a woman. Alex’s flaneur-like experiences in Harlem facilitate his speculation about his life, family, and friends. It is an unusual story, not only because of its subject matter but also because of its style. Sexuality, coded through colors, discreetly impresses upon the consciousness of the reader. The most explicitly sexual portion of the tale, for example, is a dream in which Alex is “in a field . . . a field of blue smoke and black poppies and red calla lilies.” Published in the single-issued journal Fire!! in , “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” has, until relatively recently, escaped critical notice and scholarly attention. The tale and its author, for example, were repeatedly overlooked in early, mid-, and even late twentieth-century anthologies of African American literature. And yet this short, sometimes cryptic story has a place in the black literary canon, for Nugent’s experimental narrative sculpts language, uniting the visual and the literary to create an early black modernist text. The tale begins with Alex, an autobiographical stand-in for Nugent, lying comfortably in his bed as he considers his possible activities for the day: “He wanted to do something . . . To write or draw . . . Or something.” Visual imagery resonates powerfully throughout the short tale. One notes immediately, for instance, the material appearance of the story on the space of the page – it is filled with ellipses, which connect, to use Nugent’s words, the “short disconnected thoughts” that describe Alex’s thinking process (). More than just a form of punctuation, the ellipses make the
story more poetic than mere prose and indeed appear to concretize the eponymous smoke: Alex puffed contentedly on his cigarette . . . he was hungry and comfortable . . . and he had an ivory holder inlaid with red jade and green . . . funny how the smoke seemed to climb up that ray of sunlight . . . went up the slant just like imagination . . . was imagination blue . . . ()
Nugent gives a sensual materiality to imagination and renders smoke delicately tangible. The visual impressions suggested by the words render moot the dilemma that initiates the tale, the choice between drawing images or writing words; indeed, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” evokes in a particularly effective way what Ezra Pound has called “a casting of images upon the visual imagination.” Language stimulates the eye’s mind, just as for Alex, gazing upon Adrian and Melva, the man and woman with whom he is in love, stimulates poetic stream-of-consciousness thoughts. The ellipses, which are maintained throughout “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” and represent the story’s most dramatically innovative formal feature, play a central role in making the tale provocative and visually charged. Some details are left implicit for the reader, details that are symbolized by the ellipses; and the reader must “realize” information for herself. The sexual encounter between Alex and Adrian, for example, is described when “Alex called him Beauty. . . long they lay. . . blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts” (). By foregrounding intangibility, the ellipses contribute to an abstract ephemerality privileged by some of the architects of the New Negro Movement. Or as Mieke Bal puts it, “it often happens that omitted events are brought to the fore in other parts of the text. Thus ellipsis – the omission of an element that belongs in a series – gains its power of signification.” “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” seems to suggest that if some forms of expression cannot be concretized or explicitly stated, perhaps communication lies in these ineffable gaps. The elements that are usually material, the bodies in the story, also undergo revision. Although men’s bodies in the tale are intoxicatingly beautiful (Adrian is nicknamed “Beauty,” after all), the male body is not privileged over the female. Moreover, the nonwhite body is neither politicized nor does it draw upon the conventionally instinctual ideas of blackness so prevalent in the s in popular, and primitive, conceptions of blackness. Bodies in the story are present for loving, rather than objects upon which to prove a propagandistic idea of race pride, racial purity, or “uplift.”
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“Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” functions as an unusually productive metacritical and modernist text because of its ability to make meaning despite its lack of fixed textual referents. Like the attempt to define the exact contours of modernism, the story defies concrete categorization. Confronted with reprimands about the status of his writings and the meanings of his enigmatic short stories, Alex ponders if it is worth trying to respond to such criticisms. Instead Alex, like Nugent himself according to the reminiscences of the Harlem Renaissance, reveals a confident nonchalance about societal expectations. Although the tale discusses subjects that older, established scholars of the period such as W. E. B. Du Bois or Benjamin Brawley considered “sordid, unpleasant, [and] forbidden,” Nugent details sexualities with little apparent concern over how the topics flout black propriety. A story that begins with a binary choice, “to write or draw,” ultimately suggests that a decision may not have to be made between them – that both, together, function to form a version of African American modernism. And yet even the descriptor “black modernist” is not entirely correct, since the story, like its protagonist, escapes racial labels. The story, then, has an odd, queer placement in the trajectory of Harlem Renaissance narratives. “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” subtly resists stereotypes by discussing what was considered one of the most taboo topics for the African American author, black sexuality. It challenges assumptions of the hyperembodiedness of blackness with a character who loves bodies. The surface image of Alex, a loafer, would appear to effect a conventional stereotype of the African American man as lazy. But like the paradoxical materiality of the evanescent smoke, Alex’s ennui stimulates an amazingly creative individual. “Race” in the story is not a stable category and the portrayals of blackness are as ephemeral as the cigarette smoke. “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” perhaps rivals only Jean Toomer’s Cane in terms of experimentality of language and allusions to sexuality. “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” reconceives the link between visuality and writing, or image and text, and thus perhaps unintentionally answers one of the major questions haunting African American writers during the s. There is no need to form a binary between the verbal and the visual. Rather than a choice, black modernism develops an intimacy between the two, along with other modes of black expressivity. Black modernism is a hybrid form of expression that depends on visual art as much as the literary text. Nugent’s short story registers how language can sometimes not communicate. The ellipses perform an important role in the story because
some thoughts just cannot be bluntly articulated in words; the ellipses instead point to Alex’s musings, working as a type of (non-)language that conjures “disconnected thoughts” while also rupturing conventional stereotypes of blackness. The reconceptualization of the black body and the challenge of using language to communicate, as well as the tension between the verbal image and visual text, reemerge powerfully in the text-based paintings of Glenn Ligon.
Ligon and Rankine: Intertextuality and the American Landscape Ligon’s paintings would seem to contrast markedly with Nugent’s short story. Where “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” is elusive and elliptical, Ligon’s text-based paintings initially appear self-evident. As one may assume of a photograph, there is a certain literalness in the text-based paintings. The images are, after all, composed of excerpted words from well-known writers or historical figures. But I would argue that the paintings work to visualize a subjective experience of difference that is also productively incorporated in Citizen. Where Nugent’s ellipses fill in the gaps of communication in “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” Ligon’s repetition and smudges suggest the trauma of aphasia caused by racialized verbal violence. Ligon materially depicts the potential trauma of racial “slights, snubs, or insults” that Rankine narrativizes in Citizen. Ligon’s etchings and paintings exemplify many of the conundrums of modernism, such as the pleasures and difficulties of experimenting with language. In fact, in one of his first published interviews, Ligon remarked upon the difficulty of communication, either through language or through images. His consciousness of this dilemma pushed him to experiment with using text in his art. His text-based paintings are “fundamentally about language and an ambivalence and pessimism about the project of communicating.” Usually appearing with black text on a white background, the text-based paintings do not just repeat the essay or novel from which the quoted words derive. Indeed, conceptually, one may say the excerpted words are different from the original text. The quote is repositioned, transposed from the larger narrative into a new environment authored by the canvas. The transformation that enables the text to become artwork functions as an example of black modernism in a way evocative of Nugent’s ellipses. Although Ligon has created several paintings, etchings, and neon sculptures using the literary language of African American and American writers, I am interested in four text-based paintings assembled together
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as part of one portfolio, Untitled (Four Etchings). The four panels that form the portfolio quote from two classic literary texts from different temporal markers of black modernism: two panels highlight lines from Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” and two panels depict the opening sentences of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Both literary works detail the complex relationship among language, visibility, and black subjectivity. There are similarities among all four panels, but where Ligon trades on the striking contrast of blackness on a white background in the Hurston panels, he literalizes a type of imperceptibility with the Ellison panels. The first Ellison panel depicts the first five, and part of the sixth, sentences that open the novel: “When [people] approach me, they see only themselves, or figments of their imagina – .” The second panel repeats these lines and includes the entire sixth sentence: “or figments of their imagination – indeed everything.” Significantly, the opening lines foreground what people believe they see when they look at the unnamed narrator, when visual apprehension of the narrator is translated into the spectator’s version of stereotype. Painted to appear as black typeface on a black background, the two Ellison panels are difficult to read accurately from afar and cause a strain on the eyes when read up close. As art historian Darby English notes of another Ellison panel that uses similar lines, but with black text on a white background, the “emblackening” image at the bottom of the canvas “frustrates reading.” Ligon here demonstrates that there are multiple forms of black invisibility, and that invisibility can take on many meanings and qualities (from a certain distance, the panels’ text is perceptible but not legible). By getting up close to and “approaching” the panel to perceive the writing, the spectator/reader enters into a maze of blackness created by Ligon’s black-on-black labyrinth of language. While all four panels constitute a studied meditation on black subjectivity and the valence of visuality in the construction of the black modern subject, I am most intrigued with Ligon’s citations of Hurston’s essay. In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston “become[s] colored” at the age of thirteen, when she leaves the all-black Eatonville, Florida, for the whiter space of Jacksonville. As she notes, “I was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart, as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown – warranted not to rub or run.” Hurston briefly describes the internal changes that take place within her when, as she interacts more with white Americans, she becomes aware of the psychical feelings of difference. Ligon excerpts two lines, from a single paragraph: “I do not always feel colored” and “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” The
excerpted sentences appealed to Ligon because “they talk about the idea of race as a concept that is structured by context rather than by essence. One can ‘become colored’” (Ligon, Yourself in the World, ). Hurston’s lines abstract racial difference into concrete words and refute stereotypes, even though, ironically, she later imagines herself in a cabaret, dancing “in the jungle and living in the jungle way.” As Huey Copeland remarks of these lines, “language in its corporeal and metaphorical dimensions casts blackness less as fact of perception than as a frame of mind dependent upon the presence of whiteness for its meaning.” Less lyrical, perhaps, than Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness, Hurston’s lines nevertheless are a striking indication of how disabling isolation may become when difference, here figured as blackness, is imposed upon her but not valued. What makes Ligon’s iteration of Hurston so powerful to me is the repetition on the canvas, appearing like an enjambed poem. The panels effect a slow movement from clean depiction to sullied violence. Ligon here performs what I have previously called the “textualization of the black image,” or capturing a subjective element of blackness and translating it into a legible or visible form. There is a story the Hurston panels tell. The “narrative” derives from the repetition of the words, as the eye moves gradually down the artwork, to a place of illegibility – the smudges, formed when Ligon lifted the stencils from the panel. The artist initially experimented with trying to keep the words sharp and precise until he acknowledged that “the smearing and messiness of the process . . . was the most interesting thing about the paintings” (Ligon, Yourself in the World, ). If the ellipses in “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” convey otherwise subjective thoughts and feelings, Ligon’s “smears,” a surfeit of oil or paint, offer their own form of visual communication, the violence of not being able to make meaning. Although most readers of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” take the essay as a kind of manifesto of black being, a celebration of black distinctiveness, the two lines that form the basis of Ligon’s panels are suffused with a figurative violence – the black subject being “thrown” – tossed – into whiteness, against a hard background. By foregrounding these two sentences from the essay, Ligon’s panels render the black body under violence, under pressure in an overwhelming sense of whiteness. The blurred-bottom canvases illustrate the violence that potentially resides in language, a violence that also “energizes” the text of Citizen. I’d like to pose here an affinity between the work of the ellipses in “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade” and the work of Ligon’s smudges. Darby English describes the bottom of the text-based paintings as “the volumetric
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presence which turns text to thing as Ligon’s pigment builds up on its way to the lowermost reaches of the canvas.” English helpfully refers to the viewer’s “imaging consciousness,” which, because of the effect of repetition, enables the viewer to “fil[l] in the gaps” caused by the illegible words. Reflecting an inability to form “coherent” meaning, Ligon’s blurred words still signify, but they signify illegibility as a type of trauma, for there is something haunting about the unreadability of the “lowermost reaches” of the paintings, even as the viewer’s “imaging consciousness” informs us what the illegible words are. It is the “lowermost reaches” of the paintings that “wound” me and that are, I think, the site of the paintings’ dialogue with Rankine’s Citizen. The difficulty of communicating in the presence of racial trauma resonates throughout Rankine’s Citizen. The book uses an eclectic collection of words and images in seven sections to convey the psychological impact of repetitive insults upon the nonwhite body. Rankine asked her friends to share their experiences of an interaction in which race suddenly occurred or in which a micro-aggression unexpectedly happened. Creatively engaging with their responses, Citizen explores the subtle slights derived from everyday encounters with racism and well-known twentyfirst-century incidents of racial injustice, such as the murder of Trayvon Martin in . Visual artwork such as paintings and photographs function along with poetry, prose, and experimental videos. Deftly eliding traditional categories – is it a collection of poems or prose? – Citizen extends and revises earlier questions about text and image, the hyperrealized black body, and the efficacy of communication. Ligon’s artwork occupies a central place in Citizen: the two Hurston panels from Untitled (Four Etchings) are reprinted toward the end of the third section, in which the violence directed toward the nonwhite body derives not from physical attacks but linguistic aggression only retrospectively realized as “mistakes”: “What did you just say?” This third segment is more deliberately attuned to the violence that can be wielded through language among friends, colleagues, or acquaintances, subjects among whom language is expected to be clear or at least neutral. This part is less physically disturbing than other sections of Citizen: no “accidental” murders or lynchings appear here; there are no fights among black and white boys in Southern schoolyards. Instead, these are just “some ordinary moment[s]” that take place with an academic, a store manager, a real estate broker, a cashier (Rankine ). Indeed, the banality of the scenes heightens the painfulness of the remarks. The section contends with both the violence of language and the failure to communicate – with
communication acts that signify, but not in the way the speaker expected. This failure of language results in microaggressions, describe by Rankine as episodes similar to moments “limiting the freedom of a person.” Ligon’s Hurston panels visualize the unexpected linguistic aggression that can arise in ordinary encounters. As the eye travels down Ligon’s textbased paintings, the movement is from sharp language to smudged obscurity, from “normalcy” to stunned surprise – a progression that parallels the vignettes in the third section of Citizen. Each encounter described there by Rankine is an encounter with another person that should be just an innocuous event but takes on sharp edges of pain because of that person’s language. Sometimes the language is meant as a “joke” (“you nappy-headed ho”), sometimes the words were never meant to be said aloud (“I didn’t know you were black!”), sometimes it is the person’s body “language” that communicates (the real estate woman who is uncomfortable). The movement from Ligon’s panel from top to bottom evokes a tumbling of words that lead the subject to wonder if what was heard was actually said: “Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that” (Rankine ). Read one after the other, the vignettes in Citizen mirror the delayed shock when experiencing racial slights. There is the instinctual jolt of “What did you say” when encountering the knife-like language as the mind struggles to catch up with the verbal exchanges. Or, as Rankine, puts it, “For all of your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent” (). Ligon’s blurred words evoke the faint lines in Rankine’s list within Citizen’s sixth section – a continual work-in-progress, an unfinished catalog of the names of the black diasporic subjects whose lives ended too soon, either because of violence from other “citizens,” or because of deadly mistakes by the police. Citizen’s gradual erasure of “memor[ies]” has an analog with Ligon’s blurred-bottom canvases – repetitive state violence resulting in a kind of stunned, or unreadable, aphasia. The violence at the bottom of Ligon’s panels derives, in part, from the accumulation of black oil paint and smudges, suggesting an inability to discern blackness on the white background. Race here is, to quote Ligon, “structured by context rather than by essence.” Rubbed out of the defined boundaries of the stencils, the smears increase at the bottom of the panels into illegibility. Ligon’s accretion finds its poetic counterpart in Rankine’s concept of accumulation – the ways in which multiple microaggressions described by her and her friends build up to a suffocating form of alienation. Rankine remarks: I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would
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allow these moments to accumulate in the reader’s body in a way that they do accumulate in the body. And the idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You’re reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling.
Rankine’s poetic depiction of pain collected within the body over a period of time is visualized by Ligon’s surplus of oil or paint at the bottom of his artwork, an “obdurate residue” that prevents intelligibility. By the time the eye arrives at the bottom of Ligon’s painting, there is the image of black aphasia – the loss of language, the loss of readability. An element of ennui inflects Ligon’s panel and Rankine’s text, but Citizen’s weariness is, fittingly, the most acute, the most pronounced, the “most colored.” The book’s cover image, David Hammons’s In the Hood, for example, would seem to cite the now iconic hooded sweatshirt worn by Trayvon Martin when he was killed, but as readers soon learn, Hammons created the artwork in , nearly twenty years before Martin’s murder, and in response to another episode of black violence, the beating of Rodney King. The ennui or exhaustion so commonly referenced by the readers of Citizen is, I think, in response to this unending atemporality of violence against black bodies, more readily captured, and now more easily visible, because of twenty-first-century technologies.
Conclusion Nugent, Ligon, and Rankine abstract various elements of blackness (and the body) into powerful dialogues between language and images. Early African American modernism experimented with the visual and verbal to unsettle expectations of the African American body. Today’s black modernism is still interested in disrupting stereotypes of black embodiment but has the added concern of articulating in some way the more subtle forms in which racial difference is experienced by the nonwhite body and how that difference is often accompanied by linguistic or physical violence. Ligon and Rankine wrestle with a question that occupies many African American artists: how to fully communicate the complexity of black modern subjectivity, the intangible “facts of blackness” in the twenty-first century. One reviewer of a Ligon exhibition described the process of viewing his artwork as a “shift back and forth between reading and looking, object and idea.” This is the kind of engagement the reader of Citizen also experiences, a praxis that embodies the strategies of a new black modernism. A text that interweaves the verbal and visual, that refuses easy
categorization, that encapsulates the early twenty-first century experiential dilemmas of African Americans, Citizen is a uniquely “new” black modernist text, one that recognizes an earlier visual/verbal dynamic but speaks more persistently about systemic “post-racial” trauma and critiques the sustained violence against people of color during a period of African American “success.”
Notes Other subjects that form Ligon’s text-based work include the comedy of Richard Pryor and the words of Muhammad Ali, stenciled on a canvas punching bag. Ligon also incorporates texts from white authors, for example, forming a neon sculpture that reads “negro sunshine,” a phrase appearing in Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (). Miriam Thaggert, Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ). Anne Carroll, Word, Image and the New Negro: Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture of the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); Mary Ann Calo, Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, – (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ). For other examples of work in this vein, see Daylanne English, Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); and Caroline Groeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, ). As a contrast, for example, consider the political activism of Marcus Garvey, who attracted Harlemites from the African American working class. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation, June , , –. Nugent, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, ed. Wallace Thurman (November ), –. Subsequent quotations of the story are cited parenthetically in the text. Other contributors to this important journal were Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglass, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Hurston’s short story “Sweat” and her play “Color Struck” appear in the magazine. Although Thurman had plans for more issues, the first copies of the magazine burned in a fire and Thurman moved on to create another magazine, Harlem, in . For a discussion of how African American literary anthologies omit Nugent’s short story, see Michael Cobb, “Insolent Racing, Rough Narrative: The Harlem Renaissance’s Impolite Queers,” Callaloo . (), –; and
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Christa A. B. Schwartz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –. Among the more notable omissions is that of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, first published in . This is Ezra Pound’s definition for “phanopoeia,” one of the three poetic methods in which “language is charged or energized.” Pound, “How to Read,” in The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, ), . Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, tr. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Nugent’s own life revolved around writing and drawing, and it is significant that the homoerotic tale contains, as one scholar notes, “a visual level within the textual narrative,” Schwartz, Gay Voices, . In Wallace Thurman’s satirical novel of the period, Infants of the Spring (), Nugent’s alter ego, Paul Arabian (named, perhaps, after Nugent’s initials, R. B. N.), dies a messy suicide, but in real life it is Nugent who continues to survive long past his Harlem friends, living until . See Benjamin Brawley, “The Negro Literary Renaissance,” Southern Workman (January ), . Brawley’s conservatism, as well as his lack of humor, is perhaps best revealed in his comments on a Langston Hughes poem that was also published in Fire!!, “Elevator Boy,” in which the speaker decides to quit operating the elevator. Brawley admonished that “the running of an elevator is perfectly honorable employment and . . . no one with such a job should leave it until he is reasonably sure of getting something better,” . The question is, of course, how “best” to represent African Americans. These are the general forms of “microaggressions” identified by scholar of psychology Derald Wing Sue in his introduction to Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, ), . Ligon’s art and aesthetic practices at times echo some of the major concerns that were raised during an earlier period of African American modernism. Discussing Ligon’s use of materials, for example, artist, curator, and writer Judith Tannenbaum notes that Ligon “appropriate[es] material from a wide range of sources – moving back and forth between ‘high’ and ‘low,’ from popular to arcane,” challenging the too familiar division that artificially separated high moderns from the low. Tannenbaum, Glenn Ligon: un/becoming (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, ), . Glenn Ligon, Yourself in the World: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. Scott Rothkopf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text. Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . : A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York:
Feminist Press of the City of New York, ), . Hurston’s short essay was originally published in World Tomorrow. Literary scholar John Young has traced the publishing history of the essay, noting that World Tomorrow was a “Christian socialist journal that directly and indirectly supported the New Negro movement.” John Young, “African American Magazine Modernism,” African American Literature in Transition, –, ed. Miriam Thaggert and Rachel Farebrother (New York: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming. Huey Copeland notes, in his own analysis of Ligon’s Hurston paintings, that the essay has often “been cited as a prime example of Hurston’s intransigence, even regression.” Huey Copeland, “Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects,” Representations (), . Another possible way of reading the essay is as a reflection of Hurston’s determined nonconformity. Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” . Copeland, “Glenn Ligon,” . As with many of his text-based paintings, Ligon has several iterations of the Ellison panels. The two grouped with the Hurston panels appear to be black typeface on black background. Other paintings use only the opening line of Ellison’s novel and repeat it down the artwork. The Hurston and Ellison texts have appeared on white wood doors as well as on canvas. English, How to See, . Ibid. English develops the phrase “imaging consciousness” from Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. Meara Sharma, “Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person,” Guernica (November , ), www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-sec ond-person/, accessed May , . Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, ), . Subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically in the text. Claudia Rankine, “How Art Teaches a Poet to See,” The International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, CT, June , www.artidea.org/ video-podcast/, last accessed April , . Parts of Rankine’s comments also appear in an interview with scholar Lauren Berlant in BOMB, October , , https://bombmagazine.org/articles/claudia-rankine/. Sharma, “Claudia Rankine.” English, How to See, . Holland Cotter, “Messages That Conduct an Electric Charge,” New York Times, March , , C.
Noir Film’s Soundtracks Jazz, Black Transnationalism, and Postcolonial Genres of Criminality Edwin Hill Liner Notes: “Overhearing” Stop! Who goes there? Something, or someone, lurks in the dark . . . This is what sound studies scholars call an acousmatic sound, a sound whose source is unseen. It can often trigger the deployment of a security gaze seeking to identify, listening for more movement, and reading marks of passage. But what happens when that source unseen is black, or blackened? Où est le noir dans le noir? Out of a zone of indistinction and invisibility emerges a figure of darkness . . . “Look! A Negro!” (Fanon). Can he hear me? “Ssh! You’ll make him angry” (Fanon). Is he, “are they listening to me?” (Szendy). Are they on the line? Do they overhear us? “Don’t quote me boy, ’cause I ain’t said shit!” (Eazy-E). What critical theorist and sound studies scholar Peter Szendy calls surécoute, “overhearing,” suggests “from the very beginning a basic structural affinity between listening and espionage,” a tight relation, even a collusion, between the formation of the listening/sounding subject – the subject hearing himself being heard – and the power of the state (and others) to gather information through techniques and technologies of sonic surveillance. As my references to Frantz Fanon and the rap artist Eazy-E suggest, dynamics of “overhearing” and the “otological surplus” it produces participate – although this point is essentially overlooked by Szendy – in the racialization of the sounding subject. The constitution of le noir is always already a condition of overhearing, where one hears oneself being heard within racial and colonial listening frameworks and technologies meant to surveil and contain the black body and other zones of obscurity in the Western imagination. The current chapter considers noir film a crucial relay point in the audiovisual and postcolonial construction of blackness in twentiethcentury postwar modernity. As Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton write in their pioneering study of noir: “[f]ilm noir is noir for us; that’s to say, for Western and American audiences in the s. It responds to a
certain kind of emotional resonance as singular in time and in space.” The current chapter pays close attention to the record, and the recording, of sound in noir film. It suggests that with its transatlantic history of emergence and its meditations on zones of obscurity in the Western imagination, noir film offers us a crucial listening vantage point for analyzing transformations in the ways in which the West sees and knows itself, and relates to its “others,” in mid-twentieth-century modernity. While approaches in new modernist studies have produced works on sound and media culture, much work remains to be done, especially with regard to “the literary soundscapes of the s and afterward,” as Ian Whittington notes. The fact is, as the current volume shows, new modernist studies remains dominated by the literary, often ignoring the types of multimedia intersections that creators of noir explore. Just as, following Anne Cheng, “objects dismissed by nineteenth-century Europeans as ‘curios’ or ‘fetishes’ had suddenly become crucial to the twentieth-century artists searching for new form” during the interwar years, this chapter suggests that technologies, apparatuses, and records of sound culture, often overlooked by (new) modernist studies, become crucial modalities through which noir film, fiction, and music work together to capture a “certain kind of emotional resonance,” as Borde and Chaumeton put it, transforming the soundscapes of postwar modernity and crystallizing essential if ephemeral feelings about it. Further, it suggests that modernist studies of noir, and what Noam Elcott calls “artificial darkness,” must follow the dispositifs of blackness as they technologically intersect and connect with post/colonial histories of the African diaspora and black Atlantic culture. Building on work by Ludovic Tournès, Rashida Braggs, Pim Higginson, and others, this chapter constructs its own “overhearing” apparatus, its own technologically informed and enabled means of listening to and in le noir. On the A-Side the chapter replays the noir soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (), composed by Miles Davis; the B-Side plays back the soundtrack to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux hommes dans Manhattan (), composed by Martial Solal and Christian Chevallier. In sum, the chapter overhears noir as a sonic technology of blackness, powerfully informed by transnational structures of listening that reshaped postwar modernity. Why soundtracking le noir, rather than soundtracking noir? My insistence on the French, and the definite article le, highlights that this is, and is something more than, noir as a film genre and the question of its musical scoring. Soundtracking le noir insists on the ways in which French culture adopted and adapted listening practices as a way to engage with blackness, “black people,” and “the black man”
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(le noir) as well as “black culture,” in the literal and figurative darkness of urban modernity.
A-Side: Miles and Malle: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud Turn on the radio. “What you are now hearing is Tadd Dameron and Miles Davis. This is a quintet given to the most modern form of jazz: bebop. Miles Davis on trumpet, James Moody former tenor saxophone for the great Gillespie, Tadd Dameron on piano, Barney Spieler on bass, and our friend, I think I can say, since he’s been Parisian for a long time now already, Kenny Clarke, probably one of the best drummers on the scene right now. Here is Miles Davis . . .” Maurice Cullaz’s introduction of Miles Davis to the jazz aficionados listening to the Paris International Jazz Festival, May , taking place at the Salle Pleyel, emphasizes that this group represents “the most modern form” of jazz. More than descriptive, the commentary picks up on heated debates among the French jazz intelligentsia about what constituted “authentic” jazz. That the new school musicians Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, James Moody, and others received such overwhelming representation in comparison to “traditional,” New Orleans–style musicians Sidney Bechet, Hot Lips Page, and “Big Chief” Russell Moore amounted to, for one of France’s most prominent and established voices in jazz criticism, an outrage. A few people, who know nothing about jazz, are doing everything in their power to spread bebop in our country. The recent Jazz Festival at the Salle Pleyel was their biggest move yet. Of the dozen musicians flown, at great expense, from the United States, nine were “boppers” or similar.
For Hugues Panassié, bebop represented the reappropriation of jazz by white European musicians and aesthetics. Panassié contended that this new style did not allow the instruments to produce the sound that they naturally produce. “There are some wonderful ideas in ‘be-bop,’” Panassié wrote elsewhere, “but most of them do not click, simply because they are not well conceived from an instrumental viewpoint. In the old-time New Orleans bands – despite what you may think of that style of playing – each instrument was played strictly according to its own capacity.” The “few people” Panassié refers to in the extract above are led by former-associateturned-main-nemisis Charles Delaunay. The latter shot back just weeks later in the same journal, in English: “As far as jazz is concerned, legitimate music criticism has become bankrupt. The legitimate critics have lost
touch with the trend of the times.” Perhaps bebop did not “turn its back to authentic jazz,” as Panassié contends in the pages of Présence Africaine (), as much as it turned itself toward the recording machine. * Hit the back button. Replay. Listen again. Cullaz’s voice crackles through the radio, as the Paris International Jazz Festival boasted sponsorship not only from the Comité des fêtes de la ville de Paris and the Hot Club of Paris (of course) but also from la Radiodiffusion française. The festival transmitted performances live and direct, making the record (released in ) a recording of the radio show as much as of the concert. The schism in the French reception of jazz coincides with shifts in listening technologies as much as in the evolution of jazz. The traditional story of “Jazz Age France” at times emphasizes the presence of African American performers at the expense of an analysis of the technological means through which French (and global) publics engaged with African diasporic musical forms, especially in the postwar years. Indeed, Panassié’s jazz hot is best served live. A certain notion of liveness flowing through Primitivist and vitalist discourse in the interwar period made the physical, immediate presence of black bodies crucial to experiencing and engaging with sonic blackness. But the “integral enmeshment of sound and technology in the modern era,” as Alexander Weheliye writes, has always profoundly mediated blackness and notions of authenticity, transforming the production of le noir especially in the postwar period. This transformation isn’t just taking place on the radio; it’s taking place on the screen. If in “noir” French critics name an aesthetic quality perceived in Hollywood melodramas, it also names a feeling they heard or felt resonating in those melodramas as well. That African American jazz was considered “très cinégique” (Mouéllic) in France demonstrates the ways in which visual and sonic economies mutually inform each other on multiple levels through new technologies of sounding and seeing. Let’s “overhear” the noir soundtracking of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, directed by Louis Malle, starring Jeanne Moreau. Let’s listen in to its multiple lines of hearing, its stagings of surreptitious listening and “otological surplus” (Szendy). * Cut off the lights. Play the DVD supplementary material. The room is black. It’s after dark. We see Miles Davis playing alone, chin down, eyes
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gazing up, as he lets loose the signature riff of the film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. His eyes remain fixed on an unseen screen while wisps of smoke, cut through by the light of the projector, rise up and swirl between his fingers and their action on the trumpet valves. Then a reverse angle shot, with Miles Davis set off to the side, allows us to see what he sees. Beyond his shadowy profile, the iconic scene of Jeanne Moreau as Florence Carala, wandering the streets of Paris, plays out across the small screen. The recording of the recording has flipped the script: the film is now the background, the visual track, to the sound recording session. Eventually there’s a cut to another shot: a young Louis Malle, twenty-four years old, sits next to a sound engineer in front of a giant mixing board in a sound booth. We hear Miles Davis playing in the background, as well as the sounds of the film projector. Malle takes a drag from his cigarette as a journalist queries the scene. — What exactly is going on here? — Well, it’s the American musician Miles Davis improvising to the images of my film, Elevator to the Gallows. — You mean, he looks at the images and he plays his trumpet according to what he sees?! — That’s right. What’s happening here? We’re watching the December , , airing of the French television show Cinépanorama, hosted by François Chalais. The recording of the recording session forms its own thrilling noir scene, its own multilayered sountracking of le noir: the French recording of black musical talent, the sounding of a camera obscura in the form of the recording studio, the inscription of an affective intensity that will become a sonic icon of the genre, the rerouting of French optics of noir through the black body. We find ourselves surreptitious listeners involved in an act of “overhearing” (Szendy). Our eyes are fixed to his eyes fixed to the projector’s projection, the sound of his trumpet playing enmeshed with the sound of the projector. Miles Davis’s modern, and even modernist and modernized, approach to the film score disrupts the conventional “trope of jazz” that Higginson critiques in noir fiction and that Kathryn Kalinak identifies in noir film. In this instance, the hierarchy of media that Higginson aptly critiques complicates “the multiple ways in which jazz was made by its white consumers to become the essential expression and guarantee of racial essence.” By overhearing this recording session, we tap the lines of what Louis Chude-Sokei calls the “technopoetics” of black modernist sound. Whereas
the juxtaposition of “technology” with racialized, colonized bodies has served in colonial discourse to signify essential differences between the (white) civilized and the (black) savage, Chude-Sokei borrows the notion of “technopoetics” from modernist discourse “to highlight the selfconscious interactions of black thinkers, writers, and sound producers with technology.” The recording session above, where black sound opens up new visions of filmic techniques and technologies, demonstrates the black technopoetics involved in soundtracking le noir. Here, Miles Davis’s richly complex and creative technological engagement with Malle’s film gets projected and broadcast with a French racial technopoetics fascinated by its own means of production. Miles Davis and Louis Malle’s collaborative approach to the musical score, the collaborative nature of jazz performance and improvisation adopted, and the complex ways the television show foregrounds Miles and Malle in studios and with machines, all signal a set of technologies of listening that unsettle the conventional “ways in which its French reception modified this musical field, transforming it into a race-producing apparatus,” as Higginson writes. At stake is a certain reworking of authenticity in relation to musical culture and blackness. Instead of, or at least rather than only, an “essential expression and guarantee of a racial essence,” Davis’s approach, and the ensemble’s play, combined with the camera work by Henri Decaë, as well as Jeanne Moreau’s performances of face and body movement, form a technopoetics of sonic blackness where the latter becomes “necessarily mutable, contingent, and therefore subject to going beyond itself,” not limited to a fixed essence or to the confines and scope of the black body, even as the latter remains a crucial relay point in the noir soundtrack. Fast-forward to the scene. Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) is stuck in an elevator, after having committed murder to be with his lover, and his boss’s wife, Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau). Meanwhile, he has missed their secret rendez-vous. Now she wanders aimlessly, looking for any trace of him in the Parisian night. Her inner-voice calls out to him, Davis’s trumpet responds. She thinks she sees his car, Davis stops with a start. Her posture alternately defiant and defeated, white against the black backdrop of the night, Davis’s sound tracks her movements and traces her steps. Noir fiction is all about tracing and trailing, tracking and detecting, in spaces of literal and affective darkness. Accordingly, Davis’s soundtracking plays a crucial role in the scene. She is part of his record now. The sequences and fragments of the recording session, although replete with space for forms of improvisation, had to be executed with exact timing. The French pianist of the group, René Urtreger, explains in the DVD supplemental material that
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the session, as far as he was concerned, was pretty stressful, because the musicians played not only to the images but to timers as well. The musical pace and tempo had to align as perfectly as possible with certain filmic moments whose timing was by seconds, not beats, per minute. The black technopoetics manifest here involve complex transpositions of time and movement, seeing and sounding. At the same time, Davis and Malle agreed that the musicians must interact with the images on the screen in their improvisation rather than mimic them. This contrapuntal mode of engaging music with image, this rewiring of relations between the sonics and optics of le noir, opens up space for black sound as well as black vision to play a prominent role in meditations on modernity taking place in French noir. Ultimately, our view of Jeanne Moreau’s movement is deeply informed by African American and African diasporic ways of seeing, knowing, feeling, and moving in the world. * Picture this. Jeanne Moreau looking beautifully sickening in a chic jacquard fabric Chanel two-piece (or is it Pierre Cardin?), complete with gloves and pearls, but one glove off. She faces the camera, crouched down on an elevated platform. Her right arm is reaching back, elbow up, behind her head as she holds back her blond curls on the left side of her face to expose her left ear. Mouth open, with the hint of a smile, she side-eyes Miles Davis, standing there with his Harmon muted trumpet right up against her exposed ear. His lower body is planted solidly, his upper body leans back in playing position, fingers on valves, lips on mouthpiece. He looks fresh and ready to blow her mind and ear out. It’s December , , after midnight. Malle (twenty-four), Moreau (twenty-nine), Davis (thirty-one), and his ensemble – Kenny Clarke on drums, the Frenchmen Pierre Michelot on bass, René Urtreger on piano, and Barney Wilen on tenor sax – as well as a few others, hang out in the recording studio. Some are having smokes, as we see in the recording, others champagne, which stays out of view. They watch segments of the film, Miles Davis teases Jeanne Moreau, telling her that she walks funny. The group records fragments when it’s time. In addition to the television crew, there is a photographer taking pictures of Moreau and Davis together with his trumpet. The photos are staged, likely a coordinated campaign designed to create excitement about the film. The images of Miles and Moreau together are glossy and captivating, flirtatious and fun. The sexually charged sparks that fly off the photographic image of Moreau and Davis
come from star power but also from that sexually charged juxtaposition of white (French) femininity and black (American) masculinity. While Miles Davis would be brutalized by a policeman in New York a year and a half later for being with a white woman, in France the image of Moreau and Davis together would be used to sell movie tickets and jazz records. If, as Kristin Ross writes, “a massive postwar French reaffirmation of the couple as standard-bearer of the state-led modernization effort and as bearer of all affective values as well” played a crucial role in the break up of the French/Algerian imperial couple and a retrenchment into the domestic spaces of the nation and the home, I want to suggest that images of Miles Davis and Jeanne Moreau present an alternate “ideal couple” type, one essential to the processes of modernization that Ross considers and through which French popular culture increasingly imagines itself in relation to a new partner: black America. It might not have been as powerful (or long term) as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but what about the image of Miles Davis and Juliette Greco circulating on French streets, written and rumored about on social pages and in the circles of the demi-monde? The image of Jeanne Moreau and Miles Davis sells, producing visual appeal and monetary value in powerful and powerfully new ways. Miles Davis’s performance persona, so sharply at odds with the those of a Louis Armstrong or a Sidney Béchet, produces a set of ideas and strategies concerning black authenticity and musicality, but also black masculinity, that disrupt the “ideal couple” image promoted by the state. For young bourgeois bureaucrats seeking to leave occupation and colonial war behind them, as Ross explains, these images in France’s glossy society magazines offer countermodels capable of opening up unexpected lines of flight and modes of self-refashioning. Jump to the finale. Florence Carala, desperate to find Julien Tavernier, is on the trail of a young couple seen in Julien’s fast car. The couple had stayed in a motel where, registered under the name of the Taverniers, they committed a completely different set of murders. However, the young couple took pictures of their escapades using a miniature spy camera they had found in Tavernier’s car, and dropped the cartridge off to be developed before their crime. Grave error. Trailing her suspects and desperate to recuperate this record of their crime, she is led to the photo lab, and one by one they enter the darkroom. The lab technician is developing the pictures . . . accompanied by homicide detectives. The images implicate the young couple in the crime, clearing the Taverniers. But there are other pictures too, coming into view in the blankness and blackness of the developing solution’s waters. We witness, for the first and only time in
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the film, Julien and Florence together, in each other’s arms, proof that they are lovers, that she is Tavernier’s accomplice in the murder of her husband. The homicide detective will teach her a lesson: “You see? One must never leave photos around.” Adjust Tracking. The detective’s remarks point toward what we can call, adapting Tyler Stovall’s take on a real murder case in the interwar years, a new postcolonial genre of criminality. In his short but fascinating essay “Murder in Montmartre: Race, Sex, and Crime in Jazz Age Paris,” a source of much inspiration for the current chapter’s approach to reading and hearing Miles and Moreau together, Stovall analyzes the murder of Leon Crutcher, an African American jazz pianist and expat living in Paris who was shot dead by his (white) French wife, Marie-Léonie Boyard. “Stable wedded bliss was not a central theme of Parisian modernity,” as Stovall dryly puts it, “and it certainly seems to have escaped the Crutchers.” The two were married Christmas day . They were “a classic couple of the Montmartre demi-monde.” Leon was dead before spring. Stovall shows how the Crutcher case was heard through a range of intersectional formations of race, gender, and colony, depending on the perspective of the listener. Given that diaphony, again a situation of surécoute, the case ultimately fails to fit neatly into any single one of these ways of hearing. Rather, Stovall argues, one should consider the case “a new, postcolonial example of criminality, one that reflected shifts in gender and racial discourses after the Great War.” In the context of the current chapter, we can reformulate Stovall’s phrase from above. For what we are considering here – the black records of French noir – amounts to more than a “new, postcolonial example of criminality”; it amounts to a new, postcolonial genre of criminality. In their entanglements of the musical, the forensic, the photographic, and the cinematic, the records will show, will constitute and provide their own way of tracking life and death in modernity’s dark spaces. One must never leave, but has always already left, records lying around. And the modern world has new means of leaving and recovering these traces, new ways of overseeing and overhearing us. Florence Carala doesn’t care. She touches the photos clearing in the black waters, runs her hands across this shallow bath, arranges the photos with care, and we see her image reflected in the blackness of the water too. As the image of the secret life she led with Julien Tavernier becomes visible, the possibility of their being together becomes immediately and forever lost. Miles Davis’s horn rises up from the shadows. This noir is a melancholic deep blue, a dark moving feeling musically informed by the historic sound genres of the
black Atlantic. Florence gazes at the photographs that will lock her away for years, separating her from him for decades, probably forever. “But here we’re together. Here, somewhere, reunited. You see, they can’t separate us,” Florence muses. The life of the record together is eternal, even as that same record ensures the impossibility of their being together.
B-Side: Melville, Martial and Solal: Deux hommes dans Manhattan Noir is a listening technology for sonic blackness in modernity. Its black technopoetics reveal the enmeshment of sound recording with other types of record-keeping and evidence gathering. “In the force field of sonic Afromodernity, sound technologies, as opposed to being exclusively determined or determining, form a relay point in the orbit between the apparatus and a plethora of cultural, economic, and political discourses,” as Weheliye explains, among which we might include legal discourses and evidentiary paradigms. Jean-Pierre Melville brings these connections to the forefront from the very beginning of his oft-overlooked, underappreciated film, Two Men in Manhattan. Shot partly on location in Manhattan, the film’s opening sequence begins documentary style. A diverse group of children play in the shadow of the United Nations building, where delegates from around the world are meeting. The voice-over suggests a surprisingly proximate relation between the two groups: one assembled in the streets, the other in the ultra-modern structure of the UN skyscraper. Meanwhile, inside, the official roll call registers the absence of the French diplomate Fèvre-Berthier from the general assembly. According to the voice-over, it was a petit fait, a “small fact,” a blip; but this absence gets picked up by the global media machine, broadcast in tele-machine signals of all sorts in an automated way. We witness armies of telegraphs, typewriters, telephones, and more, transmitting en bloc and at machinic speed this petit fait; the proverbial wings of a butterfly have produced a tele-typed hurricane. And the machine doesn’t stop. When a new delegate gives his speech, it too gets instantly transmitted to the world, recorded on tape. We watch the wheels spin on a tape-recording device, and then, following a jump cut, the spin of a phonographic recording machine: the human voice made official record in the most modern and modernized of ways. The voice-over explains: While the newly elected member shared his country’s gratitude to the world . . . witness these words transmitted into the winds, recorded
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for posterity on fragile magnetic tape, for lack of marble, etched into wax.
Instead of marble, “witness” these new modes of permanence and inscription; this is the new weight, the modern gravitas of marble: tele-machinic modernity relentlessly marking time and keeping track. Nothing escapes its global record. And Melville’s film is doing all this too, marking the date and the time, recording the place, the official roll call, recording the recordings, joining in the official record. The film, the camera, and the record player – all key symbolic objects in Two Men – seamlessly plug into the global media machine emphasized in the film’s opening. Loop and repeat. The machine goes on. It’s always running, all night through, just like the men that operate and oversee it . . . This is why the Agence France Press journalist Moreau (played by Jean-Pierre Melville) and the scandal-rag photographer Pierre Delmas (Pierre Grasset) are chosen to track down the missing diplomat. Melville introduces Delmas with a classic medium long shot of discarded items of clothing that lead to the bedroom with lovers post coitus. But here, the pair of high-heeled shoes, the dress, the bra lead us to an audio speaker, then to speaker wire, past a scattering of albums, and, finally, to a portable record player still spinning, next to a bottle of Johnny Walker. Delmas still has one hand on a glass, and the other on the woman under the covers next to him. In Two Men in Manhattan, records, record players, recording studios, and photographs, as well as the crossed wires that connect them all, thread together a web of social relations constitutive of the sociocultural assemblages of modern urban life imagined as Manhattan by night. What are records and record players for in noir? What does one do with and to records according to this noir soundtrack? How do they sketch out like white chalk outlines certain contours of blackness and criminality, life and death? And how do they enable, as we witness with Miles and Moreau, alternate modes of sonic and visual intelligibility? How do they sound the consumer culture modernization of the postwar West? James Naremore offers us a way of reading the devices haunting and inhabiting noir spaces. In , Aragon had written that Hollywood gangster movies “speak of daily life and manage to raise to a dramatic level a banknote on which our attention is riveted, a table with a revolver on it, a bottle that on occasion becomes a weapon, a handkerchief that reveals a crime, a typewriter that’s the horizon of a desk.” He might as well have been describing crime films of the s and s, many of which were confined to interiors and photographed in a deep-focus style that seemed to reveal the secret life of things.
Similarly, Melville picks up on the secret life of urban modernity through a meditation on the social life of records and recording machines. The latter inscribes defining features and experiences of modern life on both sides of the Atlantic: a certain management of time, a delineation of work and home, a gendering and racing of public and private space. The camera functions as a prime example, serving many purposes throughout the film. As a phallic symbol, it gets Delmas recognized, laid, and paid. It serves as a weapon, a detainer of evidence, as well as a way of writing a narrative. Surreptitious picture taking, arranging scenes in a particularly suggestive way, setting up photographic subjects so they break down: these are some of the strategies of overhearing that Delmas employs in his trade. The Delmas photographer type offers us another one of the “functionalist masculinities” Ross critiques in the postwar period, but also a key figure of surécoute in late modernity. He traffics in clandestine information gathering and the economies of the salacious rumor and the compromising scoop in the style of Hush-Hush magazine. Flip back and forth between the black records on French radio and television, in cinemas and glossy magazines. What takes shape is the extent to which the quotidian postcolonial dynamics of substitution and modernization that Ross identifies relate new ways of experiencing and understanding sonic blackness in the postwar period. The context is France’s repliement (folding, enfolding), as Ross critiques, back into the domestic space of nation and home when, in the roughly ten-year period of the mid-s to the mid-s in France – the decade that saw both the end of the empire and the surge in French consumption and modernization – the colonies are in some sense “replaced,” and the effort that once went into maintaining and disciplining a colonial people and situation becomes instead concentrated on a particular “level” of metropolitan existence: everyday life.
The music industry, in particular music considered “jazz,” “noir,” “nègre,” or “colonial,” plays a crucial role in this period of modernization. In the same year that the Jazz Festival would further instantiate a rift in the ways in which “jazz” was conceived and heard in France (), the électrophone portatif (portable electric record player), as well as the / rpm and rpm vinyl formats, arrived on French markets and began settling into French homes. New sound playing and recording technologies helped reconstitute the meaning and value of newly organized domestic space. One doesn’t just listen to records and record players, one touches and is touched by them in their materiality: using them as art or furniture;
Noir Film’s Soundtracks
flipping through stacks with nimble fingers; mastering a perhaps shaky hand to place the needle on the groove; picking up discs to switch from the A-Side to the B-Side; thumbing through liner notes; smudging and cleaning the glossy vinyl finish. * Restart, cut off the lights. According to Melville, “Except for Times Square, I assure you that in New York was a dark city. Much more so than Paris (. . .) New York is as dark as it is beautiful.” The original trailer suggests to us that this noir’s main protagonist is not just the city, but its darkness. Two men, two French men, in the immensity of an unknown city: in New York, at night. Two men who throughout the night will go on the strangest of investigations, in the least known spots of the most extraordinary city in the word, where you’re right to be afraid, where truth is located somewhere between the shadows and the light, at a time when there’s no time for following the rules, in this incomparable and diverse city that you will discover in a way you could never have imagined, by following Two Men in Manhattan!
While the voice-over delivers this foreboding synopsis, the intense and aggressively edited sequence provides a glimpse of the night the men run through, and drive through, by the light of those big American fast cars. The darkness of the night represents many things here: the spaces of the unknown, of diversity, of singularity, of the unseen and jamais vu. The darkness of the night sets up a race against time, one that is media- and fear-driven as much as based on a ticking clock. Most of all, the darkness of night serves as a kind of screen for the projection of an imaginary space. The jazz pianist and composer Martial Solal, born in in Algiers to French parents, classically trained but also self-taught in part through radio, helps compose this darkness, transposing the symbolism of color into that of sound and rhythm, and vice versa. After moving to France in , Solal played with everyone on the Parisian scene – from Sidney Béchet and Django Reinhardt to Don Byas and Kenny Clarke – developing a kind of diasporic jazz fluency in many styles. A highly respected soloist and bandleader, Solal would enjoy a prolific career, scoring the music of more than forty films, including for Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle the year after the release of Melville’s film. To my ear, Solal’s very up-tempo, piano-driven motif for the Melville trailer, which features a challenging arpeggiated melodic line played in octaves, slips in, every four
bars, an oddly metered measure, one beat short of the others at the end of each musical phrase. The effect produces something like a musical jump cut, a skip in the black record that loops back on itself endlessly. * Looking for the diplomate, Moreau and Delmas quickly realize that old French adage: cherchez la femme, look for the woman. Delmas has taken pictures of the French diplomat with three women – three potential mistresses possibly implicated in his disappearance. While Malle’s film offers a certain critical portrait of white French femininity and womanhood, Melville does something similar with white American women. The three women in question here inhabit three different cultural scenes that will take us from the highbrow theater to the middlebrow scene of the recording studio to the lowbrow spaces of the burlesque club. In each scene, Moreau and Delmas arrive in the performance space in medias res, and settle themselves into vantage points for overhearing and overseeing: backstage looking through the window of a theater set, in the sound engineer’s booth watching through the glass, and backstage in the dressing room through walls and over partitions. Each space has its structures of listening and overhearing built into its architectural blueprint. As in Louis Malle’s film, the spaces of the imagined ultra-modern city are designed not only for ease of communication but also for acoustic privacy. In Malle, it is the sound booth, the telephone booth, the double-doored CEO office. In Melville, it is the bedroom and living room, the recording studio, the greenroom. New architectures and urban plans make sound containment and noise reduction part of the demarcation of public and private space in this ultra-modern urban life, opening up new possibilities of containing and masking, as well as shaping and recording. Cut to the recording session scene. Delmas and Moreau, after visiting the first mistress, go to see Virginia Graham (Glenda Leigh) in a recording session at Capitol Records. The men arrive mid-recording of “A Street in Manhattan,” being sung by an unseen woman, backed by a jazz quartet of piano, bass, drums, and vibraphone. Melville delivers another one of his virtuosic camera choreographies. Playing with the (sexual) tension heightened by the acousmatic nature of this sound, Melville’s camera gradually makes its way past the band members, slowly following the length of the black grand piano and piano player. Once again, the musical instruments serve as a slow-tease revelation of a desired white body. Then Virginia Graham appears, but she’s not quite looking like one might have expected.
Noir Film’s Soundtracks
She’s as beautiful as she sounds (Delmas will drink to that), but she’s dressed quite casually, wears glasses, and works off a small cheat sheet, presumably consisting of lyrics, notes about structure, and other reminders. The actual song itself appears to have been arranged, if not also composed, by Christian Chevallier, an accomplished pianist, vibraphonist, and bandleader whom we can see among the group of musicians playing vibraphone. We see the musicians playing the sound we hear, but even that diagetic sound is mediated. It is (being) recorded sound, not acoustic “immediate” sound. In other words, Delmas and Moreau don’t hear it directly; they hear it through the mix of the sound engineer in the sound booth. As in the recording of Davis’s recording session, Melville’s film foregrounds the technical and technological dimensions of the performance. The audio engineer is actively transforming that sound, its volumes and equalization, its reverb and crispness, making possible the closeness of the singer’s voice, for example, and the intimacy it conveys. Virginia Graham’s look emphasizes the distinctly recording-session context of the sound we hear, and its distance from what we might have imagined. Moreover, this sound is first intradiagetic, then extradiagetic. During dialog there’s a sudden, if smooth, slip in the song’s form. A still-developing vibraphone solo gets cut, and we are abruptly jumped back to the “head,” the composed melody. Similarly, this isn’t the final product; it’s simply a take. The piano player (Art Simmons, an African American expat living in Paris since ) interrupts Moreau and Delmas’s discussion to request Graham stay for one more take. As emphasized throughout the film, the product consumed by the public – from politics to the news, theater to music – fails to give a full account of the processing and recording machines, the many fragments and takes, that constitute the official record. The final product tells less than half the story of the modern culture industry and the ways in which it weaves together the spaces of the street and the elite. These behind-the-scenes peeks are one of the thrills of the film; the French viewer imagines gaining access to the hidden sides of New York. Some French viewers might have already watched something similar on a French television show launched in called A la recherche du jazz (In Search of Jazz), hosted by Jean-Christophe Averty. Two weeks before François Chalais and his crew went to the recording session with Davis, this show aired the special episode “Aujourd’hui on registre” (Today we’re recording): For over forty minutes, Blettery and Averty documented the different steps to recording an album in a Parisian studio with the quartet of the pianist
and composer Christian Chevallier, with Kenny Clarke on drums, Pierre Michelot on bass, and Roger Guérin on trumpet. To film the work of the musicians was to film the work of television, it’s to film the apparatus of transduction.
The episode highlights new ways of bringing jazz into French homes, of affording new avenues for listening publics to hear and visualize sound. Kenny Clarke and Pierre Michelot were part of the quintet Davis brought to the recording session for Malle’s film, although they were not pictured in the Cinépanorama segment. The show featured several discussions with Chevallier about his process, not just as a musician and composer but also as a recording artist. The studio scene, with its structures of listening, harks back to the stakes of the recorded word emphasized in the film’s opening sequence. * Off-record. Melville’s use of silence has been remarked since his earliest work, and is perhaps most strikingly developed in his film Le Samouraï. The calm, cool, and collected cold-blooded killer-for-hire Jef Costello (Alain Delon) has a pet bird as his sole companion in his small one-room apartment in the city. It turns out the bird is an ingenious overhearing surveillance system. When Costello gets home after the police have bugged his apartment, he notices the feathers of the normally calm bird are scattered on the floor. It tips him off that there has been an intruder, and that they might be listening to him. In Two Men, when Delmas and Moreau finally arrive at the right mistress’s house and make their discovery – the lifeless body of the French diplomate – the silence of the space is deafening. No one is listening, no one but the record player that spins out scratch, having finished playing its tune. It’s the sound of the needle moving across a groove with no sonic inscription, and it loops back on itself endlessly in its own mechanical rhythm. That rhythm has always been there, organizing the sound in the shadows, tracking the musical tempo through its own calculus of /. The record plays out its own technopoetics of noir. It keeps (off ) track, marking an unexpected interruption, a deathly blow, like a digital clock that blinks zeros when electricity finally returns after an outage. The diplomat was listening to the record, now the record listens to him. In other words, the playing life of the record and the playing life of the human get confused – tightly bound together, enmeshed, so much so that it is difficult to distinguish them. In Malle’s film, the young couple had contemplated suicide.
Noir Film’s Soundtracks
Grabbing a handful of pills from the medicine cabinet, next to a Miles Davis album propped up on the wall, they figure they will be dead before the record finishes playing. The record player would have played out the life of the couple. It would have marked their play time and end time, serving as a kind of evidence of the truth and their love. The black record carries this surplus, this sonics of remainder, where life has left its record of depletion.
Notes Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, ), . Fanon, Black Skin, . Peter Szendy, All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (New York: Fordham University Press, ), . Eazy-E, “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” N.W.A. and the Posse (Los Angeles: Macola Records), . Szendy, All Ears, . Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir –, tr. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, []), ; emphasis in original. Ian Whittington, “Radio Studies and th Century Literature: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Remediation,” Literature Compass . (), . Anne Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Noam M. Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago: University of Chicato Press, ). In the original French: “Vous entendez actuellement, le quintette de Tadd Dameron et de Miles Davis. C’est un quintette qui se livre à la forme la plus moderne du jazz, le [. . .] bebop. Miles Davis à la trompette, James Moody ancien saxophone ténor de l’orchestre du fameux Gillespie, Tadd Dameron au piano, Barney Spieler à la bass, et notre ami, je puis dire, puisqu’il est Parisien depuis déjà longtemps, Kenny Clarke, un des meilleurs drummers, probablement, de l’époque actuelle. Voilà Miles Davis . . .” All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. “Quelques personnes qui ne comprennent rien au jazz font de gros efforts pour propager le be bop dans notre pays. Le récent Festival du Jazz à la salle Pleyel a été le plus important de ces efforts. Sur douze musiciens qu’on a fait venir à grands frais des Etats-Unis, neuf étaient des ‘boppers’ ou apparentés.” Hugues Panassié, “Un festival du jazz à la Salle Pleyel,” Présence Africaine (), . Hugues Panassié, “Be-Bop in Perspective,” Accordion Times and Musical Express (July ), .
Charles Delaunay, “The Critic’s Role,” Accordion Times and Musical Express (October ), . Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . “Que se passe-t-il exactement?” “Eh bien c’est le musicien américain Miles Davis qui est en train d’improviser sur les images de mon film, Ascenseur pour l’échaffaud.” “Vous voulez dire qu’il regarde les images et il joue de la trompette en fonction de ce qu’il voit?!” “C’est bien cela.” Pim Higginson, Scoring Race: Jazz, Fiction, and Francophone Africa (Rochester: James Currey, ), ; Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ). Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ), . Higginson, Scoring Race, . Chude-Sokei, Sound of Culture, . Kristin Ross, Fast Cars Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . “Voyez? Il faut jamais laisser des photos trainer.” Tyler Stovall, “Murder in Montmartre: Race, Sex, and Crime in Jazz Age Paris,” in Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Stovall, “Murder in Montmartre,” . “Mais là nous sommes ensemble. Là quelque part réuni. Tu vois bien qu’on peut pas nous séparer.” Weheliye, Phonographies, . “Tandis que le nouvel élue venait remercier la salle dans des termes chaleureux, voyez ces paroles diffusées dans tous les vents, enregistrées pour la postérité sur des bandes magnétiques trop fragiles, mais à défaut marbre, gravées sur de la cire.” James Naremore, “Introduction: A Season in Hell or the Snows of Yesteryear?,” in Borde and Chaumeton, Panorama of American Film Noir, . Ross, Fast Cars, . Quoted in Ginette Vincendeau, “Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Deux hommes dans Manhattan’ (): The French Resistance Comes to New York,” liner notes to Two Men in Manhattan (Port Washington, NY: Cohen Media Group, ), DVD. Deux hommes, deux français, dans l’immensité d’une ville inconnue: dans New York, la nuit. Deux hommes qui une nuit durant qui vont se livrer à la plus étrange des enquêtes, dans les milieux les moins connus dans la ville la plus extraordinaire du monde, où tout, justement, et à craindre, où la vérité se situe quelque part entre l’ombre et la lumière, dans un temps où il n’est plus question de respecter les convenances, dans cette ville incomparable et diverse que vous découvrirez comme jamais vous n’avez pu l’imaginer, en suivant Deux hommes dans Manhattan!
Noir Film’s Soundtracks
“Pendant plus de quarante minutes, Blettery et Averty documentent les différentes étapes de l’enregistrement dans un studio parisien d’un disque du quartet du pianiste et compositeur Christian Chevallier, avec Kenny Clarke a la batterie, Pierre Michelot a la contrebasse et Roger Guérin à la trompette. Filmer le travail des musiciens, c’est aussi filmer le travail de la télévision, c’est filmer un dispositif de captation.”
Language’s Hopes Global Modernism and the Science of Debabelization Aarthi Vadde
Quoi qu’on dise et quoi qu’on fasse, la solution par les langages nationales est réellement la chimère et l’utopie; et la solution par la langue artificielle apparaît comme la seule pratique.
—Louis Couturat, “Autour d’une Langue internationale” ()
Artificial or invented languages like Volapu¨k, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Latino sine Flexione, Novial, and Basic English are little more than curiosities today. Yet when Louis Couturat became secretary of the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language in in Paris, he argued that artificial languages provided a far more practical solution to the challenges posed by international communication than natural languages tethered to national traditions. Disputing the assumption that advocates for artificial languages were impossibly utopian in outlook, he argued that the real “chimère” or “chimera” was expecting a global community of speakers to embrace a language pegged to a national tradition in active competition with their own. Couturat, a prominent French mathematician, logician, and linguist, became a passionate advocate of Ido, a modified version of L. L. Zamenhof’s Esperanto, whose rules would correct for the latter language’s irregularities. Ido’s speakers referred to themselves as Idists. Bertrand Russell, a colleague of Couturat’s in the field of symbolic logic, called them Idiots. Russell and Couturat were professional allies, wordplay notwithstanding. The former had favorably reviewed Couturat’s book The Mathematical Infinite and Couturat wrote Russell privately to express his praise for Foundations of Geometry. Couturat read the book “‘armé d’un dictionnaire’, for he knew no English.” Couturat further planned to write a book popularizing Russell’s philosophy in France. In turn, Russell was an early, if lukewarm, backer of Couturat’s Delegation. In a letter to Couturat, he promises his support: “if the Russians, the Dutch, and so on, were persuaded to adopt it [an auxiliary language] . . . it would be intolerable
Language’s Hopes
that it become necessary to learn all these barbaric languages.” Russell alludes here to the conundrum of “fin-de-siècle Babel” within the scientific community, where the proliferation of publications in national languages beyond English, French, and German had made it difficult to keep up with research in one’s field. Such professional quandaries rarely figure in contemporary perceptions of artificial languages. Today’s readers are more likely to think of Klingon or Elvish than Ido or any of the other languages mentioned above. What little we do remember about the rich and varied auxiliary language movements of the first half of the twentieth century remains dominated by Esperanto, a language that Zamenhof promoted through appeals to a collective cosmopolitan and pacifist spirit. Billed as the language of hope (Esperanto itself derives from the Latin spērāre – “to hope”), Esperantists’ unabashed idealism and cultish reputation seem worlds away from the professional quid pro quo of Couturat and Russell. Yet the hope represented by the design of a universal language was rooted in something more substantial than free-floating sentimentality. That something was scientific research and scholarly exchange. Proponents of international auxiliary languages (IAL) were often highly educated members of professional communities who feared the increasing fragmentation of discipline-based knowledge across national languages. They advocated for IALs in order to promote mutual understanding in literal and instrumental terms. In other words, scholars wanted to read each other’s work and to maximize the accessibility of knowledge to fellow professionals regardless of national background and native tongue. The dream of universal scholarly communication thus underscored the practical need for a science of debabelization, that is, a systematic way of constructing and promoting an IAL to bridge the gap between native tongues. Such a science, paradoxically, would only add to Babel by spawning a host of universal languages, competing factions, and conflicts about what type of language would best serve as the preeminent language of internationalism. Should the IAL be artificial or natural; living or dead (e.g., Latin); judiciously neutral or unabashedly imperial? Here the seemingly niche and schismatic battles of auxiliary language movements spill over into the cultural and political life of Europe, its colonies, East Asia, and Latin America. The discourse around IALs raises questions that go to the heart of definitional debates about language in modernist literature of the period, even as it points to new directions for contemporary scholarship on global modernism.
Global modernism is a tough formation to describe in relationship to the new modernist studies (NMS). On the one hand, it is a subfield that brings to fruition the transnational turn of NMS. On the other hand, its affiliates, including me, regard it less as a methodological strand within the varied field of modernist studies than as a corrective to the normative conception of modernism as European and limited to the decades between and . This fundamental point should not be mistaken for consensus about how, when, and why to pursue global methodologies. Debate remains about how best to situate modernism within multiple geographies, time periods, and languages. Global modernism has thus compelled intense metacritical reflection on the organization of modernist literary history internally and in relationship to neighboring fields. Monographs, edited collections, book series, and clusters on global modernism, for instance, have tended to yield comparative literary histories that share the concerns of postcolonial, ethnic, and translation studies. Such scholarship is attentive to the constructed nature of collective identity, the cultural effects of imperialism, decolonization, and minoritization, and the migration of literature through the movement of people and mass media. Scholars of global modernism have welcomed the “Babelization” of the modernist archive, and it is now increasingly common to recognize literature written in, say, Bengali, Berber, Chinese, and Vietnamese as modernist. In turn, the field has prioritized literary language mixing of various kinds, whether in the more recognizably modernist way of privileging difficult-to-read, experimental literary forms (syncretic vernaculars, multilingualism, accented orthographies, and syntax) or in print cultural ways of tracking the histories of editing and translation. The latter approach, influenced by the turn to world literature within the discipline of comparative literature, might seem to work against the language barriers implied by Babelization; after all, the circulation of print shows how literary works become objects of consumption across multiple languages. However, I would argue that these methods extend Babel at the level of books rather than words. Versions of a literary work (reprints, editions, translations) replace an authoritative standard text, and the potential for proliferation suggests that reading a well-traveled work in the entirety of its versions is impossible. The Babelization of modernist studies has been understandably limited to natural languages, but what if global modernists took the history of artificial languages and, more broadly, computational culture as part of our remit? The history of artificial languages includes the IALs featured in this
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essay, but it also encompasses computer programming languages, cryptology, machine learning in general, and machine translation in particular. Studying these fields in relationship to modernist literature does not require or preclude the ability to code, but it does demand that scholars cease isolating the literary, ethnic, and national dimensions of language from the professional, technological, and communicative ones. The subject of artificial languages, to which I turn, reframes the principal concerns of global modernism – thinking through the relationship between languages and collectivities; deriving concepts of internationalism and globality from modernist texts – within the history of science and the philosophy of language. While each of these topics on its own is already a rich avenue of study within NMS, their confluence remains unexplored. My goal therefore is to show how the histories of global modernism and the mechanization of language intertwine. In the early twentieth century, computationally oriented scholars conceived of language in machine-like and instrumental terms. These notions of language shaped their responses to the difficulties of international communication and became sources of thematic interest as well as formal inspiration for global modernist writers. This particular nexus of linguistic science and literature rewards attention for its own sake, and even more significantly opens up a fresh sociotechnical context for the study of modernism. The push for artificial languages, arising as it did from the hurdles of multilingual scientific exchange within expanded scholarly networks, shows how the needs and interests of specific groups remain at the heart of even those technologies designed explicitly to transcend particularity. Remembering the professional circumstances that inform this moment in the history of computation offers an intriguing precedent by which to assess the communicative tensions internal to a new and enlarged modernist studies. The prevailing global and weak-theoretical models of modernism have been criticized for blurring the boundaries of the field and the meaning of modernism. However, the epistemic worth of these approaches becomes clearer when contrasted with key epistemic values animating the artificial language movements.
Engineering Dreams To talk of artificial languages as distinct from natural languages is, of necessity, to think about how linguistic discourse erects boundaries between artificial and natural in the first place. For the purposes of this essay, I will limit myself to conversations around this topic among the
“interlinguists” most associated with the International Auxiliary Language movement: Couturat, Otto Jespersen, Giuseppe Peano, Edward Sapir, C. K. Ogden, and I. A. Richards. Jespersen, a Danish linguist who was also a member of Couturat’s Delegation and Sapir’s International Auxiliary Language Association Advisory Board, brought the term “interlinguistics” to prominence. He identified it as an emergent scientific field dedicated to studying “the structure and basic ideas of all languages with a view to the establishing of a norm for interlanguages.” Interlinguistics, or the science of debabelization, blended methods from psychology, structural linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, though individual scholars hewed toward their own specialties and did not necessarily identify as interlinguists. Much of Couturat’s work predates the invention of the term. Still, interlinguistics retrospectively encompasses him. Jespersen aligned artificiality with conscious design, in “contradiction to such natural languages as English, French, etc., which have been spoken for generations and whose development has chiefly taken place without the individuals being conscious of any changes.” Yet he knew that making artificial languages palatable to the public depended on naturalizing them as well – a project that seemed absolutely plausible in the s and s, even if hindsight says otherwise. Jespersen took a not-so-surprising strategy for someone deeply trained in philology. To naturalize artificial languages, he denaturalized natural languages, which he preferred to call national languages as a way of emphasizing the relationship between language and extant forms of cultural rivalry. Eschewing vitalist metaphor, he remarked: “Languages are not organisms, and their ‘life’ is not to be compared with that of animals and plants.” Certainly, the history of national languages includes all kinds of interventions to standardize spelling, pronunciation, and the like. The shift from Latin to the vernacular languages and national language reform movements are among the most common examples of linguistic interventionism conducted in the name of cultivating cohesive regional and national cultures. IAL advocates drew on such cases to normalize their own artificial language movements for the sake of internationalism. As Edward Sapir stated in his address to the International Auxiliary Language Association in , the suspicion of artificial languages was “bound up with all kinds of romantic notions . . . of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries . . . that a language was something like a tree that grew up without human care and could not be interfered with without spoiling the growth.” In making the case for constructedness as a property of all languages, Jespersen and Sapir downplayed notions
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of language as the primordial soul of a people, but they did not deny that national languages were repositories of cultural heritage. In fact, they used the patriotism surrounding national languages to make the case for artificial languages as more neutral and therefore superior auxiliaries on both technical and political grounds. They presented artificial languages as more advanced descendants of past pidgins and lingua francas cobbled together for trade and travel. Jespersen and Sapir both referred to pidgins as “minimum languages” born of necessity and convenience. What artificial languages offer instead is a maximal interlanguage – a top-down expertly designed system that is easy to learn, efficient, grammatically simple, and logically defensible at every turn. Such a language is neither plant nor animal; it is an “engine of expression.” Indeed, IAL advocates regarded themselves as linguistic engineers tied to a social movement. Artificial languages represented a technological solution to the problem of international communication. According to Jespersen, Sapir, and Couturat, a superior IAL would necessarily combine ease of learning with an attenuation of unfair advantages. They ruled out national languages on the grounds of evening the playing field for all speakers and mitigating the growing linguistic imperialism of English. However, they also readily acknowledged the structurally European character of their internationalism given that any IAL they could offer would be lexically European rather than worldly in synthesis. At a symposium convened on the matter of international communication, Jespersen credits Chinese linguist Chiu Bien-Ming with making this point, but then goes on to argue for a syntactical structure “easily accessible to” or “in reality similar to” Chinese. This quote signals just how much of the devil was in the details. Evening the playing field in no way guaranteed an even playing field. It would be impossible to engineer a language equally accessible to groups from distant and diverse language backgrounds. Artificial language designers knew this, and so it would be redundant to unmask their projects as pseudouniversalist or particularist in disguise. Rather, it is more productive to analyze how interlinguists offset the cultural particularity of their various projects by appealing to distinct ideals of universality. The question is not which auxiliary language was actually universally adopted (they all had tiny speaking communities relative to natural languages), but rather how auxiliary languages invoked and best approximated a particular ideal of universality. Around Latin was a strong candidate for an IAL because many scholars viewed it in almost mythic terms as the classical language of science. As Michael D. Gordin writes, Latin occupied a nostalgic and transhistorical space in the
imagination of its proponents – a “Paradise Lost” of an European intellectual community whose reactivation would unify specialists of different nationalities. The Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano (on Couturat’s working committee for an IAL) designed Latino sine Flexione (Latin without inflections) to make a case for a simplified, modernized Latin that he suggested would resemble Chinese in its lack of grammar. Julia S. Falk notes, via Jespersen’s analysis of Latino sine Flexione, that by lack of grammar, Peano specifically meant a lack of inflection. In this period, interlinguists almost uniformly preferred analytical to synthetic languages as IALs, meaning languages that relied on supposedly “simple” forms of particle use and word order rather than “complicated” inflections and case structures. For Couturat, appealing to the nostalgic universalism of Latin exploited irrational emotion. The best way to compensate for an artificial language’s inevitable particularity was to rationalize its operations to the fullest. Deeply influenced by the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, he, along with Wilhelm Ostwald, Louis de Beaufront, and Jespersen, set out to remodel Esperanto on the principles of symbolic logic and mathematics. They claimed that the resulting language, Ido, was the most “universal” of languages because it was the most scientifically produced. Ido systematically integrated three principles: univocality, internationality, and reversibility. The engineered univocality of Ido depended on aligning a single word to a single concept and aimed to eliminate polysemy and thus ambiguity from the language. Internationality provided a data set of already international roots upon which Ido’s new vocabulary would be based. The reversibility of word derivations in Ido maximized grammatical consistency, making it a predictable and therefore easy-to-learn language. To be clear, Couturat knew that constructing a perfectly logical language was impossible; rather, the goal was to approximate in earthly form the Leibnizian ideal of a characteristica universalis, that is, a set of symbols, which would explain through signs the relationships between concepts. Those familiar with cybernetics will remember that Norbert Wiener regarded Leibniz as the field’s patron saint. Leibniz is the father of a computational worldview that theorizes communication through mathematical calculations. Not so different from Couturat, the cyberneticists saw binary code as an approximation of the characteristica universalis, and the digital computer as the reasoning machine capable of embodying Leibniz’s dream “in the metal.” As Rita Raley has shown, by reconceiving of natural languages as codes to be decrypted, Warren Weaver, a colleague
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of Wiener’s and early architect of machine translation, argued that the computer would be the technology to achieve universal translatability. Before machine translation lapped IALs as the superior method of debabelization, IAL developers were using the principles of computationalism on behalf of their own language technologies. Idists lobbied academic societies and other international organizations to base the selection of Ido on its having the highest degree of logicality and hence the greatest potential for progressive refinement. Roberto Garvía argues that Idists distinguished themselves from Esperantists by imagining the competition between artificial languages as a scenario of diminishing returns in which Ido would emerge as the more stable auxiliary language thanks to its rulebased adaptability. Idists believed that the “best technology necessarily crowds out competing designs,” and to ensure that Ido would be that technology, they established a standing expert committee to oversee a “permanent reform process.” Such reform was a feature, not a bug, of the language. Still this very feature is why Ido failed where Esperanto and yet another IAL, Basic English, succeeded in recruiting speakers and funding. Ido’s committee of expert scientists and linguists focused on obsessively improving a tool rather than on cultivating a community of users. In prizing the abstract universalism of logic above all else, they also missed an obvious point about language that Sapir notes in his contribution to the debate on IALs: “normal human expression does not crave any such accuracy as is attained by these rigorous disciplines [mathematics and symbolic logic].” Sapir was not rejecting accuracy per se; in fact, as with all artificial language advocates, he felt that natural languages lacked “adequate symbolization.” He thus viewed the problem of international communication as symptomatic of a still greater and arguably more fundamental problem of language: the symbolization of thought in words. Sapir’s point shows the degree to which the IAL movement crossed sociolinguistic questions with the philosophy of language. This intersection best describes the origins of Basic English (the last IAL on my agenda) in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning (). In this study, Ogden and Richards claimed that meaning preceded language and therefore advocated for a psychological approach to the study of communication. Meaning inheres in minds and things rather than in words. Moreover, words impeded meaning, for they were imperfect symbols of thought and consequently imperfect mediators between the minds of a speaker and a hearer. Ogden and Richards propounded a theory of definition that would offer a “means of controlling [words] as symbols.”
This theory inflected the design and promotion of Basic English – the -word language that acronymically embraces five key power players (British, American, Scientific, International, Commercial). From the point of view of Esperantists or Idists, Basic was an artificial language based on one national language and therefore violated the neutrality clause associated with synthetically European languages. Ogden sidestepped that notion by appealing to the imperial reach of English as effectively denationalizing it. Reframing universal languages not only as the outcome of logical reasoning, but also as the by-product of empires, he argued for English as the pragmatic basis of any auxiliary language. Given that Ogden had no qualms about abetting English-language imperialism, he was best able to take advantage of communicative conditions and powerful state and commercial interests as they actually existed: Economic motivation, especially when Science reinforces the demand, can give to any system an impersonal character and silences the resentment that is born of literary tradition. English, already largely accepted as the international language, is thus far more secure than French proved to be (as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy) or than Latin (as the international language of science).
This quote, taken from Debabelization () is a riposte written especially to Sapir’s and Jespersen’s claims in International Communication (), a collection to which Ogden wrote the preface. Artificial languages that combined multiple languages in the name of neutrality or European identity missed the point that English was the language of future opportunity. Economic self-interest demanded that people, and nations, learn it. Ogden implies that science with a capital “S” would negate the nationalism imputed to “literary tradition.” However, such a claim, in rehearsing the familiar shibboleth of science’s objectivity, obscures the real reason for Basic’s success compared with other IALs. Quite simply, Basic had more funding and state support because it appealed to the power and influence of English. Latin had once been universal to Europe, but English would be global because it was the shared language of Britain and the United States. These states aligned their geopolitical interests via English to shape, in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, “empires of the mind.” Richards would work tirelessly to implement a Basic English program in China from to , with the s being the high-water mark of his efforts. Grants from the Rockefeller Foundation supported his work. Churchill himself praised Basic English in in a speech at Harvard, “The Gift of a
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Common Tongue” (the speech in which he coined “empires of the mind”). He also constituted a committee to explore and fund Basic’s potential as an IAL. Like their fellow interlinguists, Ogden and Richards imagined IALs as a technology designed to improve upon natural language’s inferior capacities for communicating information. They conceived of language not as “a medium of communication,” but as an “instrument” (emphasis mine). By improving the instrument, they would rule out of the IAL the ambiguous, rhetorically dense, and polysemic babel that modernist critics, Richards among them, had come to theorize as the hallmark of the literary.
Modernist Dream Books So what did modernist writers make of the science of debabelization? While the answer is, of course, not as simple as “for or against,” it is clear that some were more for it than were others. Ezra Pound wrote a favorable appraisal of Basic English in “Ogden and Debabelization,” where he praised the artificial language’s capacity to simplify and purify an English language deteriorating under “the stink of capital and the beastly practices of the publishing trade.” While Pound clearly saw no literary potential in Basic English itself, he did see translation into the restricted language as a “sieve. As a magnificent system for measuring extant works. As a jolly old means of weeding out bluffs.” In other words, if a work could survive translation into Basic, it must have had some intrinsic literary value. If it could not, its lack of merit would be revealed. Pound specifies no criteria (beyond his already held opinions) by which such an aesthetic judgment would hold, but his view is representative of what other writers, including George Orwell, initially saw as Basic’s potential to cut through baroque deceptions in art as well as politics. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake passed the translation test, though it would be truer to say that the test served more as a publicity stunt for Basic English and the “Work in Progress” than as a merit badge for Joyce. Ogden, at Joyce’s request, published a translated excerpt of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in transition in and wrote of Joyce as a kindred spirit in his introduction to his own Basic English (). Even though the polyglot literariness of the Wake would seem to make a mockery of the IAL movement, Ogden treated Joyce as a partner in linguistic internationalism. Joyce’s elaborations in the literary realm complemented the interlinguist’s simplifications in the scientific realm. Both were using the expertise of their respective professions to generate a universal language. Joyce, having
also collaborated with Ogden on an audio recording of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (ALP), was more than familiar with the IAL language debates and incorporated references to Esperanto, Volapuk, Ido, and other artificial languages into his work in Ulysses and the Wake. Interestingly enough, Esperanto is referenced explicitly by Bloom in “Circe,” as part of his hallucinatory campaign for Lord Mayor of Dublin. The dream-like or nightmarish quality of “Circe” and the Wake disorient the concept of a universal language and the progressive politics of IALs. Decontextualization, multilingualism, recombination, and nonsense words render universal languages unintelligible rather than communicative. Although Joyce’s strategies certainly subvert the dream of universal communication, subversion is only half the story of his relationship to the science of debabelization. Jesse Schotter compellingly argues that Joyce’s skepticism of specific IALs belies his fascination with the origins and perfectibility of language in which perfection is achieved by closing the gap between the signifier and the signified. Such unity of language, in which symbols have an intrinsic connection to the reality they express, constitutes the great hope of the computational and the biblical imagination. Joyce’s turn to visual writing systems, in particular hieroglyphics, for an origin point to language, shows the degree to which non-Western writing has been mystified within the European imagination of universal languages. Indeed, the Chinese character conceived of as “ideograph” has been ground zero for connecting seventeenth-century theories of universal language to twentieth-century theories of modernist poetics. G. V. Desani pokes fun at the techno-mysticism of IAL projects in All about H. Hatterr (, ) when his character Yati Rambeli (Hatterr’s lawyer and “Founder-President of the Atman-Parmatman Society,” roughly translated as supreme spiritual self society, submits a plea to the society’s international mailing list. He wishes for “the East” to contribute something “practical” to the design of a universal language (Desani’s emphasis). The resulting discussion between an American “University language major,” the “Secretary,” and Rambeli himself concerns different words for “dog” across multiple languages. The silly exchange parodies the technocratic language committees erected around artificial languages: The question formulated by the University language major was referred to me both as the Founder-President and the Acharya (teacher, professor) of the Society. I concurred about kuta being Hindustani [for “dog”]: and kutiya as Hungarian and Hindustani. (In addition to kutiya being a Hungarian word, I pointed out to the learned University language major, it is the same word for dog in Hindustani but female gender, i.e. bitch: kuta
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being dog male gender.) But lacking the research facilities, as available in the United States, I was unable to explain to the language major the reason why the English, French, German, and Spanish words [for dog] were different. I issued a further appeal to our foreign list, requesting more evidence like kutiya and kutiya being identical in both Hungarian and Hindustani, to determine the universality of human language, for the sake of humanity.
Rather than focus on the utopian possibilities of a universal language, Desani descends into the internal squabbles of language building by committee. Again, the devil is in the details, but this time the details are devilish. Grammatical gender was one of the linguistic features that IAL designers jettisoned in simplifying natural languages. However, in the quotation above, noticing species gender is what produces equivalence across Hindi and Hungarian. The coincidence of the letter string “kutiya” denoting both dog and female dog then draws attention to the previously unmarked maleness of the word “dog” in English with the comparison to “bitch.” What seems like an underlying order or logic to human language turns instead toward a particularizing of previously neutral vocabulary (the unmarked gender of “dog” now marked male). In a nod to the material conditions of scientific research, Desani suggests that neutralizing the particularity of natural languages demands research facilities and funds that Rambeli cannot access. In an interesting twist on Ido’s inventory of international roots, Desani creates catalogs of two words, “pyjama” and “lens,” translated into more than twenty languages each. The first, “pyjama,” is reproduced here: le pyjama (in French), de pyjama (in Dutch), pyjamasen (Swedish), padžama (Serbo-Croat), a pizsama (Hungarian), pidžaama (Estonian), il pigiama (Italian), pijamaua (Rumanian), o pyjama (Portuguese), naktsdrēbes (Lettish), pyjamasene (Danish), der Schlafanzug (German), pizháma-ta (Bulgarian), pyjamasene (Norwegian), pyiama (Czech), pyjámy (Russian), pižama (Polish), pyjama (Finnish), pyžamos (Lithuanian), el pyjama (Spanish), ta nyktiká (Greek), pixhama (Albanian), pyjama (Turkish), la pigâmo (Esperanto), and pajamas (U.S.A).
This inventory, with the exceptions of Lettish, German, and Greek, seems to make the case for the universality of the Persian-origin word “pyjama” based on its incorporation into so many European languages with small variations in spelling or sound. However, the second inventory for the Latin-origin “lens” juxtaposes similar-looking or -sounding words across Romance languages with vastly different equivalents from languages that use different root stocks:
lente (Spanish), lentila (Romanian), linse (German), lentille (French), linte (Italian), lens (Dutch), lins (Swedish), linte (Portuguese), linse (Danish), soczewka (Polish), linse (Norwegian), čočka (Czech), sočivo (Serbo-Croat), lencse (Hungarian), linssi (Finnish), adese (Turkish), lens (Indonesian), renzu (Japanese), kioo (Swahili), lenso (Esperanto), linsa (Russian), facos (Greek), adascha (Hebrew), lens (Yiddish), adasa (Arabic). In Samskrit it is kachah, in Hindi sheesha, Urdu, Gujurati, also sheesha.
While many critics have treated the catalog as a formal strategy of both encyclopedic aspiration and boundlessness, Desani’s juxtaposition of catalogs draws as much attention to the assembly of data. As the “pyjama” catalog attests, the appearance of universality can be the result of testing on large but restricted data sets, which include predominantly Western and Eastern European languages in close contact with one another. The second “lens” catalog includes Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, and Swahili, among others. These languages are spoken beyond the continent of Europe and are more far flung in terms of contact with one another. It is not surprising that the universality test fails here. Desani’s catalogs are not about the cherry-picked words; they are about the assumptions embedded in the building of data sets. A universal language seems more plausible when unstated geographic parameters limit the set of languages by which universality is measured. In reviewing the intersection of modernist literature and interlinguistics, I opened with “canonical” modernists before moving to the new modernist writer Desani, whose polyglot experimentalism includes a critique of the economic inequalities and cultural presumptions behind scientific research into IALs. Such a move admittedly proceeds by assimilating Desani into a Euro-American tradition of modernist aesthetics – one among several aesthetic traditions from which he draws. However, I want to emphasize that global modernism cannot and has not proceeded solely according to an assimilationist rubric. One of its constitutive moves has been to multiply the traditions to which a literary work can belong and the audiences to which it might address itself. In Paul Saint-Amour’s estimation, such methods replace a strongly nominal definition of modernism with weak-theoretical formulations of it. Weak-theoretical claims treat writers as provisionally rather than definitively modernist. They also reconsider the historical and institutional processes by which modernist movements arise across different languages and geographies. To my mind, global modernism, in weakening the field’s central term, has inadvertently yielded a critique of scalability as an unalloyed good. Scalability, or the capacity to expand without changing one’s central
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principle, is a desirable feature of capitalist business models and the gold standard for measuring the performance of digital technologies. Scalable networks, databases, and algorithms have the capacity to accommodate increasing amounts of information with minimal changes to their design and operation. If expanding with minimal cost is the hallmark of scalability, modernism has scaled poorly indeed. Its central period, geography, and natural languages are regularly subject to question. Its associated formal features, affects, and practitioners have grown more diffuse. Indeed, the global field’s amorphousness, while a source of consternation for some, has yielded a transformational set of terms for making sense of what we study when we study modernism. Weak theoretical terms reformulate modernism as an imprecision instrument. In other words, there is an imperfect yet telling analogy to be made between global modernism as a set of weakly theoretical methods (i.e., imprecision instruments) and computational IALs as a set of strongly rationalized languages (i.e., precision instruments). In their inception, global modernist methods and IALs were aimed at solving the problem of growth and plurality in the professional communities that used them. Be it for a group of literary scholars working across geographies and languages or for a group of scientists publishing in different languages, these new instruments sought to produce better vocabularies for professional description and communication. Yet where the developers of IALs upheld the reduction of languages to one highly portable version, the scholars most associated with global modernism have enabled and upheld a proliferation of versions of our central term. Global modernism splinters rather than scales; it tends toward flexibility and ambiguity rather than rigidity and disambiguation. Saint-Amour goes so far as to show that even critics of vague definitions of modernism deploy weak-theoretical locutions in calling for a return to a “temporally bounded and formally precise understanding of what modernism does and means.” Such concepts as “metamodernism” demonstrate modernism’s “auxiliary or instrumental function” in literary historical arguments that effectively blur periods even as they defend traditional periodization. In practice, global modernism now functions as an internally varied critical rubric for organizing transnational and multilingual literary histories. Postcolonial studies, Afro-diasporic studies, and trans-Indigenous studies are other such rubrics. To name this fact might be to hear better and thus communicate better with those in neighboring fields that remain suspicious of the spread of global modernism regardless of how it scales. Opponents in these fields might insist on the similarity of global
modernism and IALs, whereas I have pointed to their differences as imprecision and precision instruments, respectively. Their counterargument would claim that both are lexically and theoretically European in character and that both threaten to use language (whether in the limited sense of critical terms or the more literal sense of new tongues) as a Trojan horse for smuggling colonial frameworks into territories whose current occupants would critique and resist them. Such critiques of global modernism are salient to the paradigm’s institutional future, and pertinently remind us that decolonizing modernist studies is an ongoing project. However, they are also key transmitters of the term “modernism,” and thus contribute to the term’s semantic blurriness and even to its potential rehabilitation. As modernism has morphed into global modernism, it has configured new problem-spaces and contact zones of professional expertise. It has also functioned less as a master category and more as a supplementary descriptor and aggregative tool. It is in the spirit of global modernism as an aggregative tool that I conclude this essay by pairing two works linguistically and stylistically siloed from one another: The Shape of Things to Come () by H. G. Wells and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal () by Aimé Césaire. Wells and Césaire are towering writers whose oeuvres are traditionally at odds with the Euromodernist canon. Wells had no patience with the formal experimentation of modernism as a narrowly defined aesthetic, and Césaire’s commitment to black liberation had until recently been mirrored by scholarly calls for separatism with respect to négritude and modernism. Yet both Wells and Césaire were fascinated by the possibilities of international communication, and incorporated IALs into their utopian visions of language. For Wells, utopia took the form of a World-State in which Basic English would be the official IAL. For Césaire, utopia was not an imagined society so much as revolutionary form of black solidarity expressed through the Latinate neologism “négritude.” Both writers use IALs, whether as features of the story or formal exemplars, to reflect on the capacities of language to convey and create meaning over time and space. The Shape of Things to Come is quite literally a dream book. It presents the transcribed dreams of Dr. Philip Raven, edited by Wells. Before dying, Raven “officially” a “believer and supporter” of the League of Nations, confides his disgust with its inefficacy and failure. Wells relays his own disappointment in liberal internationalism and the necessity of a socialist world state via Raven’s dreams, which offer a history of the future based on a book the protagonist reads in his sleep and transcribes upon waking. The World State of the future is a centralized bureaucracy in which “‘sovereign
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fragments,’” otherwise known as nations, have withered away (). In their place the world government oversees its vast territory by creating departments to target areas in need of reform and standardization. Comparing the exactness of the future Basic English of the World State to the exactness of monetary exchange, Wells credits the “Language Bureau” with working toward a “new level of efficiency” that will progress past the “endless looseness and flaws of the language nexus” (). Wells’s dreams were whiggish, but not foolish. He juxtaposes his deep support for Basic English, as an ongoing project of the s, with his awareness of the difficulties in communication that an IAL could never logically solve. His techno-utopianism introduces communication conundrums in reading across time that unsettle the solutions brought by the World State to communication across space. In the section most devoted to Basic English, entitled “Language and Mental Growth,” Wells offers the following caveat: (I print this section exactly as Raven wrote it down. It is, the reader will remark, in very ordinary twentieth-century English. Yet plainly if it is part of a twenty-second-century textbook of general history it cannot have been written originally in our contemporary idiom. It insists upon a refinement and enlargement of language that has already occurred, but no such refinement is evident. It must have been translated by Raven as he dreamt it into the prose of today. If he saw that book of his at all, he saw it not with his eyes but with his mind. The actual pages could have had neither our lettering, our spelling, our phrasing nor our vocabulary.) ()
In other words, the book the reader holds in her hands is not written in the Basic English of the future or even the present. The IAL’s universalizing processes cannot conquer time or the contingencies of the printed word. Raven’s book of the mind highlights Ogden and Richards’ semantic theory of communication, where language remains “a delicate and error-prone sign system” that is, at base, inadequate to the task of bringing minds into contact. Wells suggests that Raven mind-melds with his book or, more to the point, that his book and his mind are one and the same. However, Wells cannot mind-meld with Raven via any book of the eye. The printed words of the dream book invite us to think of language itself as an imperfect transcription of the mind rather than a clear window into its thoughts. Basic English, along with the philosophy of language that underpins it, proves technically untenable when Wells contemplates the material structure of the book. The IAL proves politically untenable to rebels within the World State, but Wells scoffs at the refusal of such dissidents to
communicate in Basic English: “there is no warfare without communications . . . since Basic English was repudiated . . ., [rebel messages] were translated into only a few local languages, printed on stolen paper by hidden hand-presses, and sought after chiefly by collectors” (). The romance of radicalism dies in the collector’s case, outgunned and outmaneuvered by the weapon of Basic. For Wells, the linguistic commitments that animate rebellion in Shape are pure, but impractical and consequently ensure their own trivialization. Of course, what they also reveal is the imperialism of Basic and the desire for linguistic decolonization. That desire gets a fuller airing in Césaire’s Cahier, the dream book that does not abandon historically universal languages but repurposes them. In it, anti-racist internationalism and classical Latin forge an explosive partnership. The first edition of the Cahier was published in , at a time when black diasporic intellectuals were communing in France and forging solidarities across national lines. Césaire would go on to publish major revisions of the poem over the next twenty years. As late as , in a now-infamous interview in Tropiques, he declared that written French was more capable than written Creole of expressing abstract thought. Césaire’s rejection of Creole produced a backlash against the négritude movement among Antillean intellectuals on the grounds that négritude replaced the illusion of European civilization with the illusion of African awakening. In the s, the project at hand for such figures as Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiänt, and Jean Bernabé was not négritude, but créolité, the cultivation of a regionally specific Caribbean identity in the vernacular language. It is easy to understand why Latin would get lost in the shuffle of postcolonial language politics in the s; French was clearly the colonial tongue and Creole the language of Caribbean identity. Nevertheless, returning the Cahier to the s helps explain Césaire’s choice of Latin as a strategy for bending French to his will while also cultivating a black universalism. If French was the language of the colonizer and Latin the language of mythic European unity, then Césaire’s mastery of both would yield a new language for the expression of black collectivity. Such a language would be philosophical not in the Leibnizian sense of purely logical, but in the Césairean sense of coining abstract concepts to ennoble and explain black experience. Those concepts were made by two neologisms: négritude and verrition. Gregson Davis explains the Latin grammar of both words. In the case of négritude, “the Latin suffix -tudo used to form abstract nouns, such as magnitudo, is compounded with the substantive
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négre to produce a new linguistic signifier in French.” For verrition, “the vocable, correctly decoded, is derived from a standard Latin formative suffix, -io, that gave rise to a class of abstract nouns of the third declension. That suffix is ingeniously attached to a lexeme based on the Latin verb verro, denoting “sweep.” While Davis will go on to argue that Césaire assimilated Latin into a self-conscious Caribbean literary style pace the créolité movement, I would argue instead that Césaire’s Latinate neologisms make a bid for universal communication through their very untranslatability. Untranslatability operates in two seemingly incompatible registers here – Ogden’s and the French philosopher Barbara Cassin’s. For Ogden, certain words are untranslatable in the sense of unnecessary to translate because they are already recognizable to a wide variety of speakers across languages. Such words included “Radio, Hotel, Telephone, Bar, Club.” At least two of these words, “radio” and “telephone,” denote technologies that upon invention lacked readily equivalent words in other languages. In Ogden’s view, words for new technologies, in the vein of proper names, obviate translation or, at most, demand transliteration. They circulate into new languages as markers of international standardization and global integration. Contrastingly, for Cassin, untranslatability reinforces the history of linguistic difference. Untranslatables are foreign-looking and -sounding words that retain their foreignness in the host language over time. Untranslatables for Ogden are more like loan words whose history of naturalization is forgotten by speakers of the host language (think Desani’s pyjamas across twenty-five languages). Cassin’s dictionary of untranslatables is a testament to the conviction that the histories of particular languages condition philosophical thought. Césaire’s yoking of new concepts to unique words anticipates Cassin’s claims by pushing back against the rationalist idea that concepts are definitionally universal because they transcend the languages in which they are spoken. Négritude and, to a lesser degree, verrition are untranslatables not because they transcend French and Latin, but because they repurpose and mobilize the concrete universality of French and Latin as historically imperial tongues. Such a mobilization, while repudiating the abstract rationalism underpinning universal language projects, nonetheless proceeds through similar strategies of synthetic artifice. Césaire coins neologisms that lack equivalents in other languages and that expressly denationalize the contours of black collectivity. Négritude remains untranslated across various editions of the Cahier and has achieved canonical status as both a philosophical concept and a term denoting a social movement.
Although, to my knowledge, négritude is not included in the various editions of Cassin’s dictionary, it is a strong example of an untranslatable that was conceived to encapsulate linguistic power differentials and achieved universal name recognition through use over time. Négritude fostered unity by attempting to repair spiritually the essential trauma at the heart of black identity. Such repair demanded a rooting of abstraction in the phenomenal experience of the body. When Césaire writes, “lie ma noire vibration au nombril même du monde” (bind my black vibration to the very navel of the world) toward the end of the Cahier, he modifies the Latinate “vibration” with “noire” not only to blacken the abstract universal, but also to yoke verbal communication to its more intangible counterparts (vibration or vibes as unspoken feelings that are nonetheless transmitted between people through tone, posture, bodily gesture or facial expression). Vibes are less logical and precise than words, but they color expression. In the s, if not now, vibration remained beyond the scope of treatises on the design of artificial languages. Césaire’s apostrophe (“lie-moi” or “bind me”) to the rejuvenated spirit of négritude brings the complexities of nonverbal bodily communication back into the artificial design of words and the international circulation of concepts. Césaire’s synthetic language, tied to the navel of the world, a posteriori gives birth to the concepts of négritude and verrition. In using a posteriori in this way, I am coming full circle to Couturat, Jespersen, Ogden, and other major advocates of artificially designed languages. They argued that only a posteriori languages would be viable candidates for adoption as IALs. Such languages built on the preexisting lexicons and grammar rules of natural languages rather than creating entirely new words and grammars divorced from historical usage (as an a priori language would do). Gordin writes that for such a posteriori languages to be conceived of as universal, they would have to be stripped of ethnic language’s “exceptions and complexities.” The argument for such a strategy lay in the belief that IALs must mirror “science itself,” a field of knowledge regarded as already international and universal at its core. Wells’s and Césaire’s dream books derive hope and strategy from the science of debabelization, but their prophetic literary forms put limits on the possibility of denuding language in the name of technological progress. Transcription of a book of the mind and synthetic neologism show how the transmission of words is never frictionless, that is to say never divorced from the specific media or geopolitical histories that texture meaning. An a posteriori language for Césaire in particular could lay claim to a unifying, even universalist, project without falling back on the illusion of linguistic neutrality.
Language’s Hopes
While artificial language designers strove to streamline and regulate the vagaries of natural languages, modernist writers took up IALs as tropes for exploring those vagaries against the horizons of scientific objectivity and internationalist sentiment. Modernists were thus directly and indirectly engaged with the interdisciplinary field of interlinguistics. They absorbed some of its premises, disputed others, and took inspiration from its particular methods when devising new literary forms of expression, communication, language mixing, and even data aggregation. Although interlinguists did not program machines to learn languages or perform translations based on binary code, they did contribute to the underpinning principle that language ought to be mechanized and computed. Their research into IALs laid crucial if partial groundwork for midcentury approaches to machine translation. The influence and spread of computational principles in the wake of cybernetics is well known; however, research into the convergence of literary and computational cultures in the early twentieth century remains patchy at best. The obvious reason is that in these years computational culture was not yet grounded in the electronic digital computer, but was in the process of inventing it. A less obvious reason is that the disciplines of language study themselves were very much in flux. Philology was morphing into the distinct fields of literary study (critical and interpretative in the humanistic sense of these terms) and linguistics (structural and systematic in the scientific sense of these terms). However, the dominant story of this evolving divide belies the persistence of overlapping theoretical vocabularies shaping the early twentieth-century milieu of literary theory, criticism, philosophy of language, and a mathematically inflected linguistics. Terms like “device” and “technique,” for instance, in Russian formalism and New Criticism illustrate how machinic metaphor shaped the definition of the literary work as a product of reproducible rules. In turn, as Leavisian literary criticism spread from the university to adult education and high school classrooms in the s and s, its emphasis on discriminating judgment gave way to a more proceduralist model of close reading, useful for training students en masse. Beyond literary criticism, humanists trained in traditionally philological methods of textual tracing and authentication found themselves welcome in the field of modern cryptology. Even as mathematicians quickly came to dominate these circles, humanists held positions within cryptanalytic units of the British and US military and brought traces of the philolological-cryptological encounter back to university literature departments. Such examples show the importance of revisiting the history of the language disciplines from the point of view of computational cultural
studies. They also promise a fascinating account of the sociotechnical surround of modernism. The flexibility or weak theoretical cast of modernist studies, a feature of the field hard to separate from its global turn, seems particularly valuable for guiding future work on modernist literature and the history of computation. This is because theoretical weakness orients us to epistemological questions as well as political ones: How is knowledge made and validated? Who gets to decide the criteria for determining truth? Scalability and precision are reasonable aspirations embedded within computational instruments, but they can quickly become techno-fetishes for engineers, executives, and consumers alike. Tracking how hopes become obsessions and certain qualities of thought become elevated over others is one way by which scholars of modernism can situate our research in relation to computational culture without becoming enthralled to its most fetishized principles. An openness to imprecision is not a sign of sloppy thought; rather, as pragmatists and ordinary language philosophers observe, it is a recognition of properties inherent in language. To recall Edward Sapir’s words, “normal human expression does not crave” the accuracy of universal or ideal languages. Yet studying the cravings (ravings?) of interlinguists illumines those attributes of human expression, so palpably captured by modernist literature, that stymie and stimulate the computing machine.
Notes Louis Couturat, “Autour d’une Langue international,” La Revue (), . “No matter what we say and no matter what we do, the solution by national languages is the real chimera and utopia; and the solution by artificial languages appears to be the only practical one” (my translation). The delegation reported to the International Association of Academies, an umbrella organization developed to coordinate communication across institutions of learning worldwide, though most members were based in Europe. It existed from to (before the outbreak of World War I). Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (; London: Routledge, ), . Ibid., . Quoted in Roberto Garvía, Esperanto and Its Rivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), . Michael D. Gordin, Scientific Babel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA . (), –.
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See, for example, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, Geomodernisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ); Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Eric Hayot and Rebecca Walkowitz, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Aarthi Vadde, Chimeras of Form (New York: Columbia University Press, ). I’m thinking here of the Modernist Latitudes books series at Columbia University Press edited by Jessica Berman and Paul Saint-Amour. Representative recent clusters on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform include “Scale and Form,” edited by Thomas Davis and Nathan Hensley, and “Translation and/as Disconnection,” edited by Joshua Miller and Gayle Rogers. See, for example, Gayle Rogers, Incomparable Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, ) and Harris Feinsod, The Poetry of the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). I have deliberately left out Zamenhof for several reasons. First, he developed the founding principles of Esperanto in the s before the more technoscientific proliferation of IALs. Second, Zamenhof lacked the professional and scholarly aims that brought the above linguists into conversation on delegations, at symposia, in books, and on advisory boards. Simply put, Zamenhof was not in the network of these interlinguists even if Esperanto came up in their discussions. Otto Jespersen, “Interlinguistics,” in International Communication: A Symposium on the Language Problem, by Herbert N. Shenton, Edward Sapir, and Otto Jespersen (London: Kegan Paul, ), . Otto Jespersen, An International Language (New York: W. W. Norton, ), . Ibid., . It is worth pointing out that the relationship between national language reform movements and modernist literary traditions has been a particularly flourishing area of research within or in proximity to global modernism. See, for example, Joshua Miller, Accented America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Allison Schachter, Diasporic Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Nergis Ertu¨rk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); Ben Tran, Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (New York: Fordham University Press, ). Qtd. in Julia S. Falk, “Words without Grammar: Linguists and the International Auxiliary Language Movement in the United States,” Language and Communication . (), .
Jespersen, International, ; Edward Sapir, “The Function of an International Auxiliary Language,” in International Communication, . Sapir, “Function,” . Jespersen, “Interlinguistics,” . Gordin, Scientific Babel, . Falk, “Words,” . Gordin, Scientific Babel, –. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Control or Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), . Rita Raley, “Machine Translation and Global English,” Yale Journal of Criticism . (), –. Both Raley and Lydia Liu have fascinatingly explored the link between C. K. Ogden’s and I. A. Richards’ Basic English and cybernetic methods of machine translation. See Liu, The Freudian Robot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. Garvía, Esperanto, . Sapir, “Function,” –. Ibid., –. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (; London: Harcourt Brace, ), . C. K. Ogden, Debabelization (London: Kegan Paul, ), . Rodney Koneke, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, – (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ). Winston Churchill, “The Gift of a Common Tongue,” September , , Harvard University, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/-war-leader/the-price-of-greatness-is-responsibility/. Ogden and Richards, Meaning, . To think of language as an instrument was not in and of itself new. It drew on a tradition of thought going back to John Locke and Herbert Spencer, both of whom regarded language as a tool to be progressively refined. See Will Abberley, English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. The modernist concept of the “literary” as a specialized form of language enriched by semantic ambiguity, density, and allusion is itself a historically specific one. The literary evolves into a distinct sphere of letters by annexing those features of language that inhibit transparent and instrumental communication. Ezra Pound, “Ogden and Debabelization,” The New English Weekly . (), . Ibid. Orwell would lose faith in Basic English as Churchill gained it. Basic English is the inspiration for Newspeak in . In the preface to Joyce’s Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (which contained excerpts of the Wake), Ogden wrote, “It is worth asking what can be done for Internationalism with the words of Panoptic English or whither a billion symbols will help the groping scientist; it is equally worth creating new
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symbolic melodies on the eternal themes even for a dozen kindred experts in emotional association, with the entire paraphernalia of communicative language . . .” (Paris: Black Sun Press, , xiv). The parallels Ogden draws between his language project and Joyce’s are evident, and reveal an implicit need to defend the value of both. Nico Israel, “Esperantic Modernism: Joyce, Universal Language, and Political Gesture,” Modernism/modernity . (), –. Jesse Schotter, “Verbivocovisuals: James Joyce and the Problem of Babel,” James Joyce Quarterly . (), . It was also a dream of the cinematic imagination. Silent film was heralded as a universal language of moving images most famously by Vachel Lindsay. However, as Miriam Hansen and many others have argued, cinema is as subject to the particularities of place as other media touted as putatively universal, for example, music or dance. While a comparative study of media arts is beyond the scope of this essay, such an approach would be an exciting avenue for future research. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . On this point, see Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) and Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). G. V. Desani, All about H. Hatterr (New York: New York Review Books, ), . The last chapter of the novel, in which this quote appears, was added in the edition published by Lancer Books. Ibid., –. Ibid., . Ibid., . Paul Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” in “Weak Theory,” special issue, Modernism/modernity. . (), . Aarthi Vadde, “Scalability,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus ., January , , https://doi.org/./mod.. Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory,” . Saint-Amour is quoting David James and Urmila Seshagiri. Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory,” . A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (; New York: Penguin Classics, ), . Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Lucien Taylor, “Créolité Bites: A Conversation with Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiänt, and Jean Bernabé” Transition (), –. Gregson Davis, “Forging a Caribbean Literary Style: Vulgar Eloquence and the Language of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” South Atlantic Quarterly . (July ), –. Ogden, Debabelization, .
Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, tr. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), x. Aimé Césaire, The Original Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, bilingual edition, tr. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshelman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ), . What we call “vibes” are now subject to computational approximation and measurement via sentiment analysis. Gordin, Scientific Babel, –. Dennis Tenen, Plain Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), . Christopher Hilliard, “Leavis, Richards, and the Duplicators,” in The Critic as Amateur, ed. Saikat Majumdar and Aarthi Vadde (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, ). Brian Lennon, Passwords (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), esp. –. For more on pragmatism and ordinary language philosophy in relation to modernism and literary criticism, see Megan Quigley, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) and Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
Revolution’s Demands Modernism, Socialist Realism, and the Manifesto Steven S. Lee
For art museums and conference organizers in , one clear-cut way to mark the Bolshevik Revolution’s centenary was to affirm the modernist charge generated in ’s wake. For instance, the Royal Academy’s “Revolution: Russian Art –” exhibit featured a re-creation of a Kazimir Malevich gallery, filled with black squares, as well as a fullscale “Letatlin” – Vladimir Tatlin’s flying contraption and homage to da Vinci, here lit so that shadows trailed its spinning, skeletal structure. It was beautifully executed and also familiar: the exhibit’s galleries were arranged in historical sequence, following the well-worn narrative of the political vanguard harnessing then turning on the artistic avant-garde; the experimental s in the opening galleries giving way, by the end, to the socialist realist s. When I saw it, however, the occasion of my visit to London was an odd conference also commemorating the centenary. “On the Import and Export of the Russian Revolution” was held at the London School of Economics, and despite some scheduling hiccups and the fact that every talk and question was both photographed and filmed, it seemed like just another centenary conference. But in fact the organizers had nothing to do with LSE. They had merely rented the space, as became clear at the first night’s reception, held off-site, in an imposing, unmarked building where the Soviet Union in its high-Stalinist incarnation had been lovingly resurrected. My fellow unwitting conference-goers and I entered a dimly lit hall with vintage Soviet posters and red-carpet runners leading to a security desk. After signing in and getting photographed by thick-necked, suited security guards, we were taken from there to a reception room with more posters, antique Russian decor, and a wall of black-and-white television screens playing Soviet programming. A bit later we were taken to another room featuring faceless mannequins dressed in Soviet military uniforms: one was hanging from the ceiling, another staring out the window, and another clutching a Soviet flag, every few seconds leaning
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down as though to kiss it. Either it was animatronic or an actor had been dressed as this uniformed mannequin. The punchline was that, unbeknownst to the attendees, the conference had been staged by the same people behind Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau film project – a biopic of the Soviet nuclear physicist Lev Landau, though more spectacle than coherent work of art. Journalists have documented how Khrzhanovsky re-created the Soviet Union of –, in a vast openair set outside of Kharkiv, Ukraine. There, from to , hundreds of participants lived and were only occasionally filmed after being dressed in period clothing and agreeing not to discuss the outside world. As the project’s promotional materials put it, “They fell in love, betrayed their friends, cheated on their lovers, ran experiments, grew old, had children, were arrested, and lost everything.” Two years before Dau’s controversial, multi-site premiere in Paris, the conference-goers were invited to London to keep this spectacle going: as I was told by the young woman who led us in small groups from the reception to the building’s editing rooms and mannequin workshop, as well as Khrzhanovsky’s office, the Kharkiv set had also featured various conferences and performances, visited by Nobel Laureate scientists and Marina Abramovich. At the end of shooting, actual neo-Nazis were enlisted to destroy the sets, while actual snipers kept tabs on them from surrounding buildings. After the tour, the conference-goers were brought back to the room with the hanging mannequin. We conferred on being duped set pieces for this total art project and/or elaborate money-laundering scheme. I felt as though I was constantly being watched. Both the Royal Academy exhibit and the ongoing Dau project affirm that revolution, at least in its state socialist manifestation, is a thing of the past. This is not news: in his seminal piece on “Modernity and Revolution,” Perry Anderson notes how, after World War II, “the image or hope of revolution faded away in the West.” For Anderson, the “imaginative proximity of social revolution” () was one of three conditions (along with new technologies and an academism against which artists and writers could define themselves) giving rise to modernism in the early twentieth century. However, “the onset of the Cold War, and the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, cancelled any realistic prospect of a socialist overthrow of advanced capitalism, for a whole historical period” (). Western attempts to assert otherwise – most notably in the s, with figures like Godard drawing inspiration from Mao’s Cultural Revolution – instead signified “no more than the arrival of a long-overdue permissive consumerism” (). In this light, the centenary events described
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above reinforce revolution’s even sorrier fate today: now ever more distant from us, revolution and its (sometimes thrilling, often oppressive) aftermath have been stripped of ideological content, while the aesthetic forms emerging from revolution have become objects to fetishize and commodify. This has long applied to the works of the s Soviet avant-garde, but the Dau project shows how Stalin-era surveillance and enclosure – even without the irony of s Moscow conceptualism – can now be repurposed as contemporary installation art. So what is left to be gained from the intersection of revolution and aesthetics? The usual coordinates used to debate this subject – art versus propaganda, modernism versus (socialist) realism, Brecht versus Lukács – fail to register just how impotent the revolutions of the twentieth century seem from the vantage of our post–post–Cold War present. Instead, scholars emphasizing historical defeat and leftist affects have yielded more productive, resilient approaches to salvaging past revolutionary utopias – for instance, Fredric Jameson’s discussion of modernism and death in Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, and Jonathan Flatley’s reading of melancholy as a historically determined, mobilizing force. Accordingly, Christina Kiaer finds in Aleksandr Deineka’s s paintings a “lyrical strand of Socialist Realism” that crossed “private emotion and publicly oriented feeling to create a shared visual language of socialism.” Kiaer moves beyond the binary of modernism versus realism via an overarching socialist feeling that hints at lost alternatives to contemporary commodity culture. My chapter aims similarly to blur the boundaries between modernism and socialist realism – not through a focus on affect, but rather by thinking about some of the founding documents of socialist realism as manifestos. Here I will be building on Martin Puchner’s use of the manifesto genre to connect art and revolution, specifically his connection of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto to a variety of avant-gardist manifestos. Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution exemplifies new modernist studies in its expansive mode thanks to the dispersion of the manifesto genre itself – the book spans Italian and Russian futurism in the early s, Latin American creationism in the s, and TDR’s manifesto issues in the s and s – as well as the genre’s mass cultural and political applications, in line with the NMS’s unsettling of high-low cultural dichotomies. Puchner reminds us in particular of the frequent affinity between communism and modernism, thus pointing to a radical horizon for the NMS – the NMS as reclaiming the revolutionary pedigree of modernism, an effect heightened by the manifesto-like quality of the NMS’s founding documents. However, as Max Brzezinski and Mark Steven have argued and as
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Puchner has conceded, reading the Communist Manifesto strictly as a literary genre occludes the text’s concrete material and political demands; Marx becomes, in Brzezkinski’s words, “not the forefather of actually existing socialism and communism, but only a stylistically experimental author.” Yet Marx was both communist forefather and experimental author, as I will show precisely by tracking the manifesto in the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao. The point here is not simply to expand further the NMS but to understand the meaning of revolution today: as we will see, in contemporary China – the most prominent vestige of international socialism and emerging center of global capitalism – the manifesto genre points to an enduring revolutionary aesthetic that carries both official weight and radical potential. It offers a model of representation that levels the hierarchies separating author and subject, artist and audience, “modern” West and “exotic” East – in short, an inclusive cultural practice best understood neither as modernist nor socialist realist, but rather as part of this still-unfolding genre. * That Poetry of the Revolution largely misses the Soviet Union and China can be explained by Puchner’s emphasis on theatricality – on the fact that, upon writing, the Communist Manifesto and twentieth-century avant-gardist manifestos lacked authority. Instead, the manifesto is selfauthorizing: the Communist Manifesto is a history of revolution that also tries to create history – “history as revolution.” It does not simply address, but actively seeks to forge, “the proletariat” by telling them to unite (Puchner ). That is, the manifesto’s claim to authority rests on a revolution that has not yet happened, a history that has not yet been enacted. More specifically, central to Puchner’s definition of the manifesto is a tension between unauthorized theatrical acts (as one might find on a theatrical stage) and performative speech acts, as defined by J. L. Austin – speech able to project authority and act on the world by following accepted conventions. As Puchner writes: Speech acts must battle and conquer the threat of theatricality in order to become speech acts. Such a battle between theatricality and performativity is nowhere as visible as in the manifesto. Saying that the manifesto is theatrical means that its speech act occurs in an unauthorized and unauthorizing context; the theater, for Austin, is the paradigm for such an unauthorized context. However, the manifesto does not rest comfortably in this unauthorized space; indeed, it tries to exorcise is own theatricality by borrowing from an authority it will have obtained in the future. All
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manifestos are intertwined with the theatrical, driven by it and troubled by it, and they all seek to turn the theater into a source of authority. ()
Implicit here is the possibility that once a manifesto ceases to be theatrical and gains authority – once the anticipated political and/or aesthetic revolution occurs and the performative purges the theatrical – the manifesto loses relevance or perhaps even ceases to be a manifesto. For Puchner, the genre requires (or at least is most compelling when it features) an unresolved, recurring tension between the theatrical and the performative, between texts that are ends in themselves and those that are means to ends (). This seems to be why the operations of specific communist parties and regimes fall beyond his purview. Instead, his coverage of the Soviet Union stops with the Russian futurists – correctly depicted as embattled visà-vis the “manifestos and propaganda controlled by the emerging [Soviet] state” () – while his coverage of China stops with the Chinese liberal Hu Shi rather than Hu’s Peking University colleagues Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, cofounders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, state socialism never ceased to be theatrical – as seen, for instance, in Alexei Yurchak’s study of late Soviet culture. Also drawing from Austin, Yurchak notes how, even in official settings, performative utterances can advance the non-authorized, flexible meanings that Puchner associates with the theatrical. Specifically, Yurchak shows how Soviet society’s performative dimension (for example, the act of voting in a fixed election coupled with the context and conventions leading one to perform this ritual) overshadowed literal, “constative” meanings (the “literal meaning of a resolution or a candidate” guaranteed to win said election), rendering the latter “open-ended, indeterminate, or simply irrelevant.” This does not mean that the performative dimension was simply antistate or anti-socialist; rather, it allowed the “last Soviet generation” to “preserve the possibilities, promises, positive ideals, and ethical values of the system while avoiding the negative and oppressive constraints within which these [were] articulated.” Yurchak thus uses the performative to move beyond the binaries typically applied to state socialism – for instance, the idea that Soviet subjects were either dissidents or conformists, proSoviet or pro-Western, authentic-selves or masked-selves. To this series we can add Puchner’s opposition of the performative and theatrical, and suggest that in the realms of really existing socialism, the manifesto genre not only flourished but became lived experience. This becomes evident if we turn to the s establishment of socialist realism, typically associated with Stalin’s imperative that writers become
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“engineers of the human soul.” At its official launch during the Soviet Writers’ Congress, the Bolshevik official Andrei Zhdanov declared in his keynote speech that such engineering entailed “knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as ‘objective reality,’ but to depict reality in its revolutionary development.” Zhdanov, who would become an instrumental figure for both Stalinist terror and campaigns against cultural “formalism,” here lends credence to the common understanding of socialist realism as depicting life not as it is, but as it should be – in other words, outright lies serving an authoritarian state. However, coming on the heels of a state-sanctioned Cultural Revolution (–), which had elevated doctrinaire “proletarian” artists and writers over their avant-gardist counterparts, the Soviet-wide Writers’ Union inaugurated by the Congress purportedly transcended sectarianism and signaled a more ecumenical approach to literature. Accordingly, the lens provided by Puchner makes it possible to see Zhdanov’s speech as future-oriented rather than merely normative. Just as Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto both “theoretically constructs” and “identifies with” a unified proletariat that does not yet exist – a class in itself that does not yet speak for itself (Puchner –) – Zhdanov’s “reality in its revolutionary development” pushes writers to depict a revolution that has not yet been completed. They are to help enact this revolution through their writing, just as the Communist Manifesto tries to write its own history – namely, “the history of the future” in which everything described in the manifesto will have come to pass (Puchner ). The Writers’ Congress specifically provided a glimpse of how, in this future to come, literature would no longer advance social or national hierarchies – as became evident in the reimagining by the Congress of world literature and world literary history. In Marx and Engels’s famous words about capitalism’s dislodging of nations, “from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” Puchner elaborates by describing the Manifesto as a new, future-oriented literary model, de-emphasizing itself as an original text and emphasizing instead “total translatability” (). The Writers’ Congress, by contrast, sought to reconceptualize past literary forms from the perspective of the liberated future. After declaring the proletariat the “sole heir of all that is best in the treasury of world literature,” Zhdanov defined socialist realism as entailing an emphasis on “real life.” This in turn denoted a rupture with romanticism of the old type, which depicted a non-existent life and non-existent heroes, leading the reader away from the antagonisms
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and oppression of real life into a world of the impossible, into a world of utopian dreams. Our literature, which stands with both feet firmly planted on a materialist basis, cannot be hostile to romanticism, but it must be a romanticism of a new type, revolutionary romanticism. ()
As Katerina Clark has elaborated, revolutionary romanticism meant an emphasis on the monumental and heroic; socialist realism thus combined “what hitherto seemed uncombinable: verisimilitude and mythicization.” However, this combination was not arbitrary, but drew from an unorthodox understanding of world literary history, combining realism, romanticism, folklore, and myth in a way that troubled the boundaries of literature itself. Maxim Gorky made this clear in his own keynote speech at the Congress, immediately following Zhdanov’s: Myth is invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a given reality its cardinal idea and embody it in imagery – that is how we got realism. But if to the idea extracted from the given reality we add – completing the idea, by the logic of hypothesis – the desired, the possible, and thus supplement the image, we obtain that romanticism which is at the basis of myth and is highly beneficial in that it tends to provoke a revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that changes the world in a practical way.
Thus, myth yielded realism; combining this with the desired and possible yielded a revolutionary, transformative romanticism hearkening back to myth. Unseating familiar notions of literary progression – romanticism giving way to realism giving way to modernism – Gorky here presents myth as cutting across modernity and pre-modernity. For him, myth, folklore, and “the people’s oral tradition [ustnoe tvorchestvo naroda]” had always had a material basis since they were reflections “of the phenomena of nature, of the struggle with nature and of social life” (). As examples he cites ancient Greek and Russian medieval epics as well as Russian folktales, all harmoniously blending “reason and intuition, thought and feeling” in ways only possible when a “creator directly participates in the work of creating realities, in the struggle for the renovation of life” (). Accordingly, if socialist realism foregrounded positive heroes, for Gorky “the most profound and vivid, artistically perfect types of heroes were created by folklore, the oral tradition of the toiling people.” Socialist realism thus pointed to a world literature modeled not on the translatability and circulation of the Communist Manifesto, but on precapitalist forms that from the standpoint of a liberated, proletarian society were retrospectively granted revolutionary significance. This helps to
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explain one of the most striking features of the Congress, as studied by Kathryn Schild: the fact that it served not just to inaugurate socialist realism but also to showcase Soviet minority literatures. Gorky asserted in his speech that Russian writers “obviously have no right to ignore the literary creation of the national minorities simply because there are more of us than of them,” though despite his implicit Russo-centrism here, a majority of the almost delegates belonged to minority groups. Gorky then quoted at length a letter from a Tatar writer who decried being treated like an “ethnographical exhibit,” drawing interest only from “lovers of the exotic and the rare in the big cities.” The Congress thus took a stand against the kind of urban exoticism that several modernist studies scholars have unpacked, for instance, in Goncharova’s neoprimitive East, Picasso’s African masks, and Pound’s Cathay translations, and that Soviet writers and artists had come to associate with Western imperialism. (In response, as I have shown elsewhere, these writers and artists experimented with both anti-imperialist exoticisms and explicitly anti-exotic depictions of non-Western cultures.) Clearly, however, more progress was needed: the speech of Emi Siao (Xiao San), one of two delegates from China, critiqued Soviet films and stories that still depicted the Chinese as opiumsmokers, the men with queues and the women with small feet, calling this “exotica of the worst type.” He also chided delegates for gawking, during a break between sessions, at the feet of the other Chinese delegate, Hu Lanqi. Another de-centering presence was the formerly impoverished Dagestani poet Suleiman Stal’skii, dressed in national costume and performing an ashug song and chant that concluded: V bol’shoi prostor nagornykh stran Prevetnyi znak ashugu dan. I vot ia, Stal’skii Suleiman, Na slavnyi s”ezd pevtsov prishel. [Going to] the great expanse of mountainous lands A sign of greeting is given to the ashug [poet-singer] And so I, Stal’skii Suleiman, Have come to this glorious congress of singers.
This staid Russian translation, which was read right after Stal’skii’s chant, captures the conventions of the ashug form: three rhyming lines followed by a fourth line that is repeated in each stanza, slightly changing with every appearance. In this closing stanza the Dagestani periphery blurs together with the Muscovite center – Stal’skii’s destination rather than departure point recast as mountainous expanse. The Congress of Writers becomes
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instead a congress of ashug singers like him. In short, Stal’skii’s chant advanced Gorky’s expansive understanding of socialist realism as incorporating minority cultures and oral traditions. Stal’skii – later declared “Homer of the th Century” by Gorky – showed how the alignment of socialist realism and myth could valorize minority cultures in the present rather than relegate them to the past. While most everything at the Congress was authorized in advance (Siao’s critique of his fellow delegates providing one exception), Stal’skii also affirmed the event’s theatrical quality: specifically, it was a theatrical performance that purported to solve once and for all the problem of getting a class in itself to speak for itself. I draw here from Petre Petrov, who describes the Congress as a carefully managed show in which the authors became the audience and their subjects took the stage: At intervals throughout the writers’ debates, organized groups of common folk from various walks of life proceeded down the aisle of the magnificent Hall of Columns and ascended the podium. These were the “delegates without membership cards,” as Boris Pasternak referred to them: industrial workers, representatives of kolkhoz collectives, Young Pioneers, soldiers, scientists.. . . All of them made, essentially, the same demand: “Show us.” In different voices, the people’s representatives were demanding that they be represented (darstellt). In the voice of comrade Bratanovskii, speaking on behalf of proletarian authors of technical literature: “Our collective order to you, comrade writers, is: get closer to the industry worker, depicting him not only at the machine, but also showing his fight for acquiring high technical qualification, for absorbing all achievements of world culture.” . . .
In Petrov’s account, life appeared to enter the Congress. These ostensibly unofficial participants became part of the text of the Congress, demanding to be represented by authors in the sense of darstellen, artistic representation. Petrov adds, however, that these participants also represented themselves – in the sense of vertreten, political representation – via a “pure self-exhibition” that succeeded in possessing and affecting the audience of authors, many of whom were moved to tears. In effect, this unseated the author’s supposedly privileged position vis-à-vis those represented (darstellt). The revolutionary class in itself – including workers, peasants, women, minorities – was already speaking for itself. The author’s task was simply to show the immanent truth emerging from the people themselves. According to Petrov, this required not empirical investigation on the part of writers, but an emotional openness to the new coming-to-be called socialism – “to be organically one with the Soviet style of life”
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() – which would yield a new way of seeing and, thus, representing. In this way, socialist realism resolved the darstellen / vertreten distinction found in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and famously highlighted by Gayatri Spivak. The key here was not naive faith in a speaking subaltern but a state of being in which the liberation of subalterns was assured by socialism. In response, the writer was, in Petrov’s words, “to cease ‘representing’ (in the sense of darstellen) and begin the movement of showing” – that is, to show not the writer’s own perspective but “the general quality of a world whose objective logic has laid itself bare” (). Thus situated on the new ontological ground of Soviet socialism, the role of the author was greatly diminished, foreshadowing the fact that with the subsequent onset of Stalinist terror, many (including several who attended the Congress) would simply cease to be. In sum, the two-week Congress was a living manifesto that upended literary hierarchies and shattered the boundaries separating art and life. This does not change the fact that socialist realism was a Stalinist institution that oppressed countless writers and artists, or that in the wake of Khrushchev’s secret speech, it increasingly became a historical curiosity even in the USSR. At its inception, however, we find a remarkably inclusive instance of words becoming action via an anti-capitalist ontology that is now all but lost to us. Present-day efforts to reproduce merely the form of revolutionary total art (e.g., the Dau project, Soviet avant-garde exhibits) absent this ontological content can only affirm what we already know: our ever-growing distance from social revolution. * This distance is less clear in countries that are still nominally socialist, most notably China, where revolutionary aesthetics maintain their historical imprimatur. To be sure, the continued appearance of revolutionary slogans and symbols seems cynically at odds with the country’s capitalist hyperdevelopment. However, this gap reopens the specter of theatricality as discussed by Puchner: that is, though authorized by the state, revolutionary aesthetics in China today have the potential to break free from state aims and gesture to a still-unrealized socialist revolution. In so saying, I am building on Xiaomei Chen’s argument that in contemporary China, propaganda performances as well as the Communist Manifesto itself serve to monumentalize the CCP but also have the potential to highlight the country’s “problematic and disappointing reality.” Chen explicitly expands Puchner’s purview by describing the Communist Manifesto’s peculiar
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flexibility in China, where “after Mao’s death, cultural officials and performing artists collaborated on and transformed, without seemingly obvious tensions, the Maoist socialist reading of the Manifesto into a postsocialist revisionist imagining.” In short, the manifesto genre seems to be alive and well in China. The rest of this chapter will show how the really existing manifesto continued its run from the Soviet Union of the Stalinist ’s to China of the s, specifically Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art; and from there it will leap to the present day via Xi Jinping’s Beijing Forum on Literature and Art. Puchner’s manifesto framework makes it possible to connect Moscow and Yan’an , which, surprisingly, tend not to be discussed in tandem. Though Soviet culture had long inspired several on the Chinese left, Mao’s Yan’an Talks emphasized the need to draw from local cultures and center the masses. As one might expect given Moscow’s vexed record with the CCP (most famously, the directive to ally with Chinese nationalists, who under Chiang Kai-shek proceeded to nearly annihilate the CCP in ), Mao urged caution about foreign models and took aim at devotees of the May Fourth cultural movement – advocates of “enlightened” European styles who had arrived in Yan’an from cities like Shanghai. He did mention one influential Soviet novel, but this because its emphasis on a “small guerrilla band” offered a model for “serving the masses in the base areas,” with little concern for “old world readers.” In short, one of the premises of the Talks was a critique of Eurocentrism and its imperialist underpinnings. Though the Yan’an Talks lacked the vivid theatrical performances of the Soviet Writers’ Congress, they better fit Puchner’s notion of the manifesto thanks to the CCP’s tenuous position at the time: forced to this remote city in the Northwest, living in loess caves, battling both the Guomindang and the Japanese. Unlike Zhdanov and Gorky, Mao needed to project an authority that was yet to come: like the Communist Manifesto, the Talks endeavored not just to describe but to create – specifically, a new culture marked by a “unity of politics and art, a unity of content and form, a unity of revolutionary political content and the highest artistic form possible” (). Mao went on to hint that this envisioned unity would exceed the manifesto genre itself: For someone to perform a task solely on the basis of his motives and not bother about its effect is equivalent to a doctor only being concerned with making out prescriptions and not caring whether his patients die as a result, or like a political party only being concerned with issuing manifestos and
. not bothering to see whether they are carried out or not; how is a position like this still correct? ()
If Puchner casts the manifesto as wavering between the performative and theatrical, Mao here seems to banish the latter in favor of verifiable action. The Talks sought to inaugurate a “living Marxism-Leninism” not confined to the written page but “fully applicable in the life and struggles of the masses” (). Intellectuals were to recognize that their “processed forms” were secondary and inferior to the “natural forms” of “popular life” () – namely, the “language of the masses” (), with their “budding literature and art (wall newspapers, murals, folk songs, folk tales, popular speech, and so on)” (). Thus, writers and artists needed to learn the masses’ “natural forms” so as to broaden their audiences; before they could educate the masses, they first needed to be educated by them. Mao here was grappling with the same problem of representation encountered both in the Communist Manifesto and the Soviet Writers’ Congress: how to get a class in itself to speak for itself. Just as at the Writers’ Congress, this entailed the subordination of artists and writers visà-vis their audiences, as well as the valorization of folk cultures as revolutionary. Again, Mao was critiquing urban transplants who had embraced European culture and, in many cases, had dismissed traditional Chinese culture as feudal remnants and the masses as irrational. As Shu-meh Shih notes, typically in such circles “it was only when Western modernists ‘validated’ Chinese aesthetics by appropriating it that Chinese culture was seen as having the capacity to be modern.” In contrast, Mao here proposed that this culture could itself serve revolutionary, modernizing functions, without Western mediation – a valorization of folk cultures that curiously echoed the Soviet Writers’ Congress. Despite Mao’s seeming parochialism, debates about Stalin’s call for culture to be “national in form, socialist in content” had in fact taken place in China from the s. But Mao’s Talks departed from the Congress by emphasizing empirical knowledge of the masses rather than an anti-capitalist ontology – a simpler solution to the darstellen / vertreten tension, and therefore perhaps more portable and durable (able, for instance, to survive socialism’s collapse). Intellectuals just needed to listen to the speaking subaltern, and one concrete effect of the Talks was that more artists and writers began incorporating folk cultures into their works. At the same time, Mao recognized the subaltern’s limits, leaving room for representational and creative flexibility. He described the intellectuals’ “processed forms” as superior to the masses’ “natural forms,” since the
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former were more effective at organizing and concentrating instances of everyday oppression. This made it possible to awaken and arouse the popular masses, urging them on to unity and struggle and to take part in transforming their environment. If there were no processed literature and art, but only literature and art in their natural form, it would be impossible to accomplish this task or at least to do it as powerfully and speedily. ()
Thus, as Kang Liu notes, intellectuals were tasked not with “a simple, transparent representation of real life as a mimesis of unmediated reality,” but rather with a complicated process of “transcoding” crude, popular forms into “another ideological, textual form, which is also aesthetically more refined and polished.” A case in point can be found at the Lu Xun Art Academy, which was housed in a former Spanish mission on the outskirts of Yan’an and which had a Western orientation before . David Holm describes how, after the Yan’an Conference and subsequent curriculum changes, the Academy combined elements of yangge (a “motley collection of songs, dances, and folk plays,” often bearing sexual and religious undertones) with European-style “spoken drama” (huaju, which emerged in Shanghai during the May Fourth Movement and drew from Stanislavsky). The result was an eclectic repertoire of agitational performances by multiple, often touring troupes with up to , total participants. Mao’s Talks thus yielded a new mass theater. To borrow Puchner’s description of futurist manifestos performed on stage: “the theatricality at work in all manifestos here returns to the actual stage and is allowed to develop its full force” (). Indeed, Mao’s Talks arguably provided a necessary precedent for Puchner. Upending notions of base determining superstructure (as he likewise did in his essay “On Contradiction”), Mao urged all writers and artists to produce works that could themselves claim historical agency, stating: Literature and art are subordinate to politics, and yet in turn exert enormous influence on it. Revolutionary literature and art are a part of the whole work of revolution.. . . If literature and art did not exist in even the broadest and most general sense, the revolution could not advance or win victory; it would be incorrect not to acknowledge this. ()
The importance that Mao here grants to literature prefigures Puchner’s account of a genre generating its own authority. In turn, Puchner draws from Althusser’s description of the manifesto as “not a text like others: it is a text which belongs to the world of ideological and political literature,
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which takes sides and a stand in that world. Better, a text that is an impassioned appeal for the political solution it heralds” (quoted in Puchner ). Althusser’s debt to Maoism has been well established, but it would be speculative to suggest that Mao’s engagement with the manifesto genre – again, his demand not just to issue but to carry out manifestos – also influenced Althusser. What is clear, though, is that efforts to resolve the Communist Manifesto’s push-and-pull between the performative and theatrical, as well as the perennial task of representing (in both senses) the revolutionary class, persisted in China and the USSR alike. The point here is not to retread the trajectories of figures like Althusser who, disillusioned with Western capitalism (and, in many cases, the Soviet Union), sought revolution in a fetishized, red East. Such journeys tended to turn a blind eye to the oppression that issued from such events as the Writers’ Congress and the Yan’an Conference. Accordingly, as alluded to near the start of this chapter, Perry Anderson dismisses past efforts (for instance, in Paris of the s) to revive modernism via “revolutionary tempests from the East” (). With a generation having passed since the Cold War’s end – long enough for the emergence of new Cold Wars, farcically devoid of ideological substance – these tempests from the past now seem purely theatrical, lacking any present authority or consequence. This makes it both remarkable and troubling that, in Beijing , Chinese President Xi Jinping convened his own Forum on Literature and Art, where he pressed “literature and art workers” to center and serve “the people” and to “carry forward the banner of the Socialist core value system” – the primary value being patriotism. Artists and writers were to reflect this system via a vivid, vigorous “lifelike manner,” and were to employ “true-to-life images to tell people what they should affirm and praise, and what they must oppose and deny.” The result would be the attainment of quality, virtue, righteousness, and beauty. In short, Xi’s speech was a straightforward endorsement of patriotism and realism, as well as a clear attempt to solidify his leadership by performing Mao’s same role from Yan’an . Curiously, Xi also echoed Stalin by calling artists and writers “engineers of the souls,” a description not found in the Yan’an Talks; and yet there was obviously no sense in the speech of any Soviet-inspired anti-capitalist ontology. Instead, the point seemed to be to invoke the very heaviest hitters of state socialism, restoring to the manifesto genre a performative, authoritative dimension that might have seemed incongruous with post-socialism, but in retrospect augured heightened censorship and repression in contemporary China. At the same time, situating Xi’s speech vis-à-vis past manifestos (, , )
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Figure . Seventh Congress Site, Yan’an, June . Photograph by the author
underscores the unwitting theatricality of the event – a theatricality opening the possibility that, as long as the CCP continues to stage its revolutionary past, an international socialist horizon will remain latent as global capitalist hegemony shifts to East Asia. * At least this is what I sensed while visiting Yan’an a few months after the Dau conference, as part of a group project on the circulation of interwar leftist aesthetics. Like Dau, here too were lovingly preserved relics of revolution, all also stuck in time. In a narrow green valley, we saw the brick building where the CCP’s Seventh Congress took place under the profile portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Visitors posed behind the podium for photos, some raising arms in mock declamation (see Figure .). Next door, in the small room where the Conference met, tour guides regularly broke into song. Above the valley floor one could explore at will the caves where Mao and other officials lived: there was nothing cordoning off the seemingly untouched beds, desks, and
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bookshelves. We figured security was unnecessary since all of the other visitors were Party members, the wealthy elite of Chinese society. They were walking around in festive groups, some wearing matching uniforms and carrying portable seats for impromptu lectures. It was like Dau but less sinister: there was an air of idyllic, back-to-basics rejuvenation. There was also plenty of cause for cynicism. Across the street from one of the cave sites, a massive new cultural complex featured a -themed food court and multiple theaters behind a glass-fronted chandeliered lobby. An actor dressed as Mao posed for photos. We saw a musical about May Fourth intellectuals abandoning Shanghai for Yan’an, where they labored, fought, and fell in love alongside peasants and soldiers. The plot was overwhelmed by multiple dance numbers and gymnasts dangling from hoops and ropes above stage and audience. The musical began with a soldier suspended from a rope and running along an animated map tracing the Long March’s route, and concluded with red confetti raining down on us. It seemed like empty, glossy spectacle, and yet the next day at the Lu Xun Art Academy site, as the sole visitors to an exhibit on the Yan’an Conference’s th anniversary, we saw now-uncannily familiar photos of yangge dance from that time, as well as old woodblock prints of soldiers dangling from ropes. The glossy spectacle had faithfully echoed Mao’s mandate to serve the masses – the revolutionary manifesto recoded as commercial entertainment, with just the faintest hint of communism’s specter.
Notes http://dau.xxx, accessed December , . On Dau, see Michael Idov, “The Movie That Ate Itself,” GQ (October ); James Meek, “Diary,” LRB . (October ); and Vladislav Davidzon, “The ‘DAU’ of Stalin Opens in Paris,” Tablet (February ). Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review (), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –; Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Christina Kiaer, “Lyrical Socialist Realism,” October (Winter ), . Kiaer here regears earlier connections made between the Soviet avant-garde and socialist realism, most notably Boris Groys’s influential argument about their shared totalizing impulse. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA . (), –.
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Max Brzezinski, “The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?,” Minnesota Review (), . Thanks, as well, to Paul Saint-Amour for this insight. For more on modernism and communist revolution see, for example, T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –; and Mark Steven, Red Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Brzezinski, “New Modernist Studies,” ; and Steven, Red Modernism, . For Puchner’s response to Brzezkinski, asserting the value of literary studies undiluted by haphazard social science, see Martin Puchner, “The New Modernist Studies: A Response,” Minnesota Review (), –. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the AvantGardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Xiaomei Chen, Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . However, Puchner describes Breton’s occasional authoritarian bent as comparable to Stalin’s (–), while his recent The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization (New York: Random House, ) notes how the Communist Manifesto was picked up by Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro (–). Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), , , . Puchner acknowledges the “theatrical echoes” in Austin’s speech act theory, but then asserts, “More important than these echoes, however, is the tension between Austinian performative speech acts and theatrical acts that informs Austin’s theory throughout.” This tension is then cast as hostile opposition: “Speech acts must battle and conquer the threat of theatricality in order to become speech acts. Such a battle between theatricality and performativity is nowhere as visible as in the manifesto” (–). Yurchak arrives at a more flexible view by drawing from Derrida’s and Bourdieu’s readings of Austin: Derrida’s emphasis on the “semiotic power of discourse” and Bourdieu’s emphasis on “the delegated power of external social contexts and institutions” point, for Yurchak, to the performative’s “unpredictable meanings and effects in new contexts” (–). A. A. Zhdanov, “Soviet Literature – The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature,” in Problems of Soviet Literature, ed. H. G. Scott (London: Martin Lawrence, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), , –. This ecumenicalism was belied by the speech of former Comintern official Karl Radek, which, anticipating the subsequent anti-“formalism” campaigns, critiqued Proust, Joyce, and their Soviet admirers for foregrounding the microscopic at the expense of the contradictory reality created by capitalism. Karl Radek, “Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art,” in Problems of Soviet Literature, ed. H. G. Scott (London: Martin Lawrence, ), .
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Evgeny Dobrenko has recently lent credence to this socialist realism / Communist Manifesto connection – both converting language to action – by arguing that in the Soviet Union, socialist realism was an all-pervasive mechanism that itself produced Soviet socialism. See his Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ). Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), . Maxim Gorky, “Soviet Literature,” in Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress, ed. H. G. Scott (London: Martin Lawrence, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. I have modified the translation slightly based on the original. See Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, ), –. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi, . As Katerina Clark shows, Georgy Lukács affirmed this notion in a article connecting socialist realism to both the European realist novel and ancient Greek epic, thus “according socialist realism a transnational, European context.” Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, – (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), –. Accordingly, Clark elsewhere notes an affinity between socialist realism and Walter Benjamin’s storyteller, who bases “historical tales on a divine plan of salvation” and shows how events are “embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world” (quoted in Clark, Soviet Novel, ). Clark adds that the Stalinist novelist’s “historical tales” were “based on something analogous to the ‘divine plan of salvation’ followed by the medieval chronicler, namely on the Marxist-Leninist account of history” (Soviet Novel, ). Interestingly, Benjamin’s “Storyteller” essay cites Gorky in its discussion of the Russian storyteller Nikolai Leskov, and Benjamin seems in accord with Gorky when he describes the storyteller as a “craftsman” who hasn’t yet been alienated from labor: stories bear the imprint of experience and identity; they are “the raw material of experience” fashioned in a “solid, useful, and unique way.” However, even while noting the alienating effects of what succeeds the story (namely, the novel), Benjamin, unlike Gorky, does not call for the modern revival or regearing of storytelling: “To present someone like Leskov as a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increasing our distance from him.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, ), , , . On the demographic and linguistic composition of the Congress, see Kathryn Schild, “Between Moscow and Baku: National Literatures at the Congress of Soviet Writers,” PhD diss., UC Berkeley (), , . Schild discusses how, in keeping with Stalin’s call for culture to be “national in form, socialist [originally ‘proletarian’] in content,” the Congress featured multiple reports on the teleological advancement of individual minority literatures, the aim being to develop these to the level of Russian literature. This work builds on that of Yuri Slezkine, who situates these reports,
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specifically their emphases on national literary genealogies, vis-à-vis Soviet nationalities policy, which by the mid-s had reified national boundaries, traditions, and elites. As the decade proceeded, the policy would take an increasingly repressive, Russo-centric turn, culminating with several mass deportations; however, the promotion of a diverse range of nationalities continued until – and arguably contributed to – the USSR’s demise. Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review . (Summer ), –, especially –. Steven Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Literatures (New York: Columbia University Press, ). On Goncharova, Picasso, and Pound see, for instance, Jane Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –; Josephine Park, Apparitions of Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –; and Steven Yao, Foreign Accents (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi, . Siao singled out the ballet The Red Poppy, which would later prove a sticking point in Sino-Soviet relations. See Edward Tyerman, “Resignifying ‘The Red Poppy’: Internationalism and Symbolic Power in the Sino-Soviet Encounter,” SEEJ . (), –. For more on Siao, see Katerina Clark, “Berlin/Moscow/Shanghai: Translating Revolution across Cultures in the Aftermath of the Shanghai Debacle,” in Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi, – (my translation). Stal’skii is discussed in Schild, “Between,” –. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi, . In a more sustained way than Puchner, Janet Lyon discusses this problem as intrinsic to the manifesto genre: the manifesto speaks on behalf of a hypothetical “we” – a “potential audience” that “occupies the position of either supporting or rejecting the manifesto as a representative text.” For Lyon, the manifesto thus advances a “provisional community” that simultaneously challenges and affirms universalism via an “in-between” subject who, with the aid of the manifesto, enacts a transition from a bourgeois public sphere to Habermas’s “plebian public sphere.” Dating from the French Revolution – and reemerging, I would argue, in the Soviet Union of the s and s – this sphere is stripped of “literary garb” and purports to speak for the uneducated “people,” but in asserting a new universalism repeats or creates its own exclusions. Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), –, –, –. Petre Petrov, Automatic for the Masses: The Death of the Author and the Birth of Socialist Realism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –. Hereafter cited parenthetically. For a detailed list of Congress speakers, see Schild, “Between,” –.
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Given Spivak’s use of Marx’s darstellung / vertretung to emphasize a “divided and dislocated” subaltern subject unable to speak for herself, she would likely dismiss this solution as essentialist and utopian. “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . However, Petrov (linking Heidegger and Stalinism) elsewhere asserts that socialist realism foregrounds not an essentialized revolutionary subject, but rather “an immanent state of being that externalizes its essence and, in so doing, calls to life new phenomena, new realities of life.” See Petre Petrov, “The Industry of Truing: Socialist Realism, Reality, Realization,” Slavic Review . (Winter ), . For an example of Soviet-inspired revolutionary poetry inhabiting the darstellung / vertretung divide, see Jonathan Flatley, “‘Beaten, but Unbeatable’: On Langston Hughes’s Black Leninism,” in Comintern Aesthetics, –. Explicitly engaging Spivak, Flatley shows how Hughes’s s writings function like a vanguard party that amplifies rather than leads black workers, all the while reflecting on the difficulties of representation in both senses of the word. Evgeny Dobrenko, “When Comintern and Cominform Aesthetics Meet: Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe, and Beyond,” in Comintern Aesthetics, –. Chen, Staging, , . Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art,” in Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art,” tr. and ed. Bonnie McDougall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, ), . Hereafter cited parenthetically. As Shu-meh Shih has shown, Republican China was no ordinary colony, given the many different European powers present, the ability of Chinese intellectuals to differentiate between European imperialism and European culture, and Japan’s mediating role between Europe and Asia. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, – (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –. According to Shih, post- state denunciations of imperialism neglected this complexity, leading to the decades-long exclusion of modernism from Chinese literary studies, which instead emphasized realism and socialist realism – themselves foreign imports (). As David Holm explains, the Talks were part of Mao’s broader Rectification Movement (–), which sought to overcome CCP sectarianism and boost morale amid an onslaught of political, military, and economic crises. David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Shih, Lure, , . Interestingly, Emi Siao, the Soviet Writers’ Congress delegate from China, quoted above, opposed the Western-oriented May Fourth Movement and instead “proposed that Mao Zedong’s own poems in the classical style be used as a model for the new national form of poetry.” However, though Siao was present in Yan’an, he seems to have had little influence there. Holm, Art and
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Ideology, . One prominent example of the revolutionary valorization of Chinese folk cultures (albeit drawing from Soviet, Western, and Japanese influences) came in the form of s and s woodcuts. See Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). For the long-running Chinese discussions of “national form” see Holm, Art and Ideology, –. For the changes prompted by the Yan’an Conference, see ibid., –. Kang Liu, Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Liu notes that subsequent editions of Mao’s Yan’an Talks deemphasized this process through elisions that pointed instead to crude reflection (). See also Bonnie McDougall, introduction to Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art,” tr. and ed. Bonnie McDougall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, ), . Holm, Art and Ideology, , –, . Central to Puchner’s notion of the manifesto is Althusser’s and Gramsci’s discussion of Machiavelli’s The Prince – specifically how this text creates its own political agent, the “New Prince.” Accordingly, Liu writes writes that Mao’s vision of Yan’an as a new worker-led dynasty “sounds much like a Gramscian vision come true – a new Jacobinian era of a ‘Modern Prince’ where ‘national-popular collectives’ hold sway” (Aesthetics, –). Liu then adds that Gramsci would have been horrified by the coercion of urban intellectuals under Mao’s hegemony; Althusser, in contrast, seemed to endorse the Cultural Revolution. Warning Western scholars about applying seemingly progressive theories to the non-West, Xiaomei Chen notes, “In fact, to many Chinese readers and critics, the question of ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ is painfully reminiscent of the familiar question of ‘For whom do we speak?’ which was the central issue raised by Mao Zedong in his Yan’an Talk,” leading to the imperative to extol rather than expose revolutionary reality, the Cultural Revolution, the suppression of intellectuals. Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of CounterDiscourse in Post-Mao China (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. Chen thus affirms the Talks’ relevance to postcolonial theory while also pointing to a long tradition of Western theorists (e.g., Althusser, Barthes, Kristeva) who romanticized Maoist China. “Xi Jinping’s Talks at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art,” https:// chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com////xi-jinpings-talks-at-thebeijing-forum-on-literature-and-art/, accessed December , . Again, I am drawing here from Xiaomei Chen’s argument in Staging Chinese Revolution. On socialism as a “necessary reserve” in contemporary China, see Perry Anderson, “Two Revolutions,” New Left Review (), . For a more overtly subversive instance of contemporary Chinese theater echoing revolutionary theater from the past, see Bo Zheng, “Workers of the World, Unite!,” in Comintern Aesthetics, –.
Feminism’s Archives Mina Loy, Anna Mendelssohn, and Taxonomy Sara Crangle
In a feminist utopia, pockets proliferate. Not awkward, separate appendages stashed beneath layers of dress and petticoat; not pouches too small to accommodate a woman’s hand. Instead, comfortable garments are “shingled” and “quilted” with pockets “convenient to the body”; that reinforce and ornament; that signify a “practical intelligence, coupled with fine artistic feeling,” and a sensibility free from “injurious influences.” These are the necessary placeholders of an all-female populace that shuns ownership, but gathers information at every turn to feed their collective, “conscious effort to make it better.” The resolutely positivist women of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland () are many things: foresters, builders, biologists, farmers, teachers, parents, eugenicists. Crucially, they are also archivists, keepers of museums and institutional records. These women carefully transcribe all they are told about the world beyond their well-fortified land, itself a secret pocket within an unidentified continent. In turn, their male informants, an easily overpowered invading triumvirate, make records of this unknown civilization. But the novel begins with the narrator’s admission that he no longer possesses these materials. The gravity of this loss is undermined when we are told about the first time that he and his comrades prepare to escape Herland’s feminist surveillance. Instead of photographs and documents, they fill the capaciously pocketed clothes they have been given “with nuts” – yes, nuts – “till [they] bulged like Prussian privates in marching order.” Could the inherent limitations of a phallic economy be better satirized? This joke comes to fruition in Gilman’s sequel, With Her in Ourland, where the Herlander is the apotheosis of the cultural observer, reporter, and taxonomist. On her trip round the globe, Herland’s ambassador Ellador amasses voluminous notes and images, proving capable of “cheerful and relentless classification” and genealogies; hers is “a marvellous gift for selecting the really important facts and arranging them.” Ellador does not merely store knowledge, she puts it to good use. Among her most notable productions is, near predictably, “an amazing little pocket history” of nations that she
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compiles to share with the multi-pocketed Herlanders. In Gilman’s archival war of the sexes, Herlanders are the supreme curators. Decipherable taxonomies are the substrate of archives and gender alike: genre is the drawing of a limit, the establishment of a prohibition, and the circumscription of nature, “for example, a biological genre in the sense of gender.” As Judith Roof observes, a “binarized and delusively symmetrical version of gender sustain[s] patriarchy.” Gilman’s Herland trilogy contests what Roof delineates as the Western conviction that “(re)production” relies upon the integration of opposites: products result from conjoined labor and capital; narratives from protagonists and antagonists; offspring from male and female. Single-sexed, Herland is socialist, strife free, and parthenogenic. Derrida asks: “What about a neutral genre/gender? Or one whose neutrality would not be negative (neither . . . nor), nor dialectical, but affirmative, and doubly affirmative (or . . . or)?” Presumably it is in the absence of this neutrality that Derrida posits the hymen as the link “between the feminine and masculine genre/gender.” Hymen, invagination, and “a pocket inside the corpus” are all Derridean motifs for the blurring of genres, for the trespass of categorical limits. Does this female anatomy undo delusive symmetry, gender imbalance? Or is the interstitial better invoked by Derrida’s less heteronormative tympanum? Counterphilosophizing with the hammer of the balancing inner ear, Derrida’s “Tympan” explores “irregular cavit[ies]” and pliable boundaries that are constraints and linings. His “vestibular canal[s]” include not only the taut, reverberating ear drum, but gesture to “the vulva and all its parts up to the membrane of the hymen.” Either way, the embedded, embodied space counters the principles of classification, which, as Foucault argues, originated in tandem with the scientific elevation of observation, of body parts visible, identifiable, and collatable. What is stowed away, internalized, thus evokes the uncategorizable, a violable fragility existing beyond or within temporal and spatial markers. As limit or challenge, taxonomy is somatic, as inseparable from the lived body as it is from the archived corpus. Institutionalized taxonomy is a condition of modernity, and is the self-conscious toy and tool of modernism proper, which, so the story goes, privileged genre over gender. But as the archives of modernist Mina Loy and late-modernist Anna Mendelssohn indicate, feminist challenges to genealogical hierarchies are as abundant as Herland’s pockets. What’s more, as “vestibulum” the category “archive” itself is increasingly interrogated, expanded, and reinvented, processes that lie at the very heart of the classification that is the “new modernist studies.” *
Taxonomy is somatic; taxonomy is sacrificial. Kinships build on absent truths or subjective cohering principles; kinships require exclusion, excision, and replete executions. The first European museums – revered sites of archival display and hubris – opened at the end of the fifteenth century, or the same period that saw Columbus stake a claim on Haiti and Dias sail round the southernmost tip of Africa, events that will catalyze the global expansion of European commerce, pillage, war, and genocide. As Ann Stoler argues, European colonists adored social categories, and labored to make them stick: Dutch colonial archives instantiate how records are “arsenals” that embed “governing strategies” even as they fixate obsessively upon those who evade ready classification. To invent a category is to create a fiction. With reference to the archives of the East India Company, records that articulate what “becomes the reality of India,” Gayatri Spivak writes: “The colonizer constructs himself as he constructs the colony.” Ritualized archival presentations sustain fictions: chaotic displays of “primitive” artifacts in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographic museums “proved” that “others” benefited from imposed labels, definitional order. As the British artist and critic Roger Fry imperiously insists: “It is for want of . . . intellectual powers of comparison and classification that the negro has failed to create one of the great cultures of the world.” Taxonomize or be taxonomized. But of course, Europeans fell prey to their own demarcations: nineteenth-century phrenologists and physiognomists generate the most literal of archival corpuses, collecting features and photographs to identify the ideal job applicant, the good neighbor, or, come the s, the malign criminal and the “degenerate.” Taxonomy has a long history of complicit allegiance and lethal expulsion, as is chillingly attested by Hans F. K. Gu¨nther’s Racial Science of the German People (). Small wonder contemporary artists evince an “‘anarchival impulse.’” But before antipathy, excess. And as so often, excess of a patriarchal kind. Come modernism, we are told, writers and painters “erect their art within the archive.” Bouvard and Pécuchet () is a protracted library catalog, Ulysses () is a compendium of literary genres. Creators recreate the archive; the archive recreates the creator for posterity: “by the late s . . . literary modernism established its patrimony in archives and special collections.” Jeremy Braddock’s “patrimony” is apt: his foregrounded lineages are Charles D. Abbott’s Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo, a success that justifies the adoption of four noteworthy modernist sons – Williams, Joyce, Lewis, and Graves – into that institutional family, and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at Yale, overseen by its founder, or the comically self-appointed “‘Carlo, the Patriarch’” Van
Feminism’s Archives
Vechten. This is the modernist genealogy that prompted Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz to argue that “questions pertaining to gender [and] sexuality . . . continue to propel important scholarly endeavors” in the new modernist studies. Alert to the limitations of taxonomy, Anne E. Fernald takes umbrage with this too-nominal, too-vague classification. For Fernald, Mao and Walkowitz sequester feminism beyond what is central to new modernist critique, demarcating it as a plausible, but extracurricular, pursuit. By this reading, feminism retains its status as modernist sacrificial victim, as faded, striving typist to the old boys avuncular. Fernald is far from alone in her objection, one that has driven a spate of special journal issues and the founding of Feminist Modernist Studies. Yet it is arguable that the new modernist studies, like feminism itself, is a brand that incorporates and unabashedly promotes, one crafted to assuage cultural anxieties and omissions, to assert legitimacy against misperception. Counterkinships. In turn, the political usefulness and revolutionary credentials of both ideologies are under not just scrutiny, but fire: is the new modernist studies a mere “retrofit[ting]” of past mores, “a gossamer-like attempt to consolidate the current inchoate status quo of the work on modernism currently being produced”? Is feminism likewise “an outdated conceit of masculine modernism”? Regardless, the urge to coalesce persists, an act confirming the value and the limitations of segregations social and intellectual. Against the sidestepping of the new modernist studies, Fernald espouses a renewed commitment to the “archival exploration” that has long defined a feminist scholarship rooted in the recovery of the material, the experiential. And there is a discernible history of modernist archival matrilineages, albeit often more precarious than their patrimonial counterparts. In The Archival Turn in Feminism, Kate Eichhorn details the inception of the first major women’s archives, brought into being to preserve the material culture of the first wave of feminism. In , the World Center for Women’s Archives and the International Archives for the Women’s Movement were launched in New York and Amsterdam respectively; both were begun by feminist daughters of Jewish immigrants, and both quickly foresaw that records of women’s history were under fascist threat. This fear proved accurate: the WCWA closed because funding couldn’t be secured in the war years, and the IAV was seized by the German military. The righteousness that catalyzed these collections has not diminished. Witness the following, from a WCWA pamphlet on its founding impetus: The public at large did not realise the extent to which history had eliminated the story of women. Existing institutions, even women’s colleges, tended to specialise in men’s materials. They had very little source material
of any kind because women themselves were inclined to destroy their own documents while carefully preserving the letters or other materials of their father and brothers. . . . In short, American women four years ago . . . were inclined to ignore or belittle their women’s heritage and to forget that the keepers of records are guardians of civilisation and culture for generations to come.
Direct echoes of this proclamation reverberate through contemporary feminist scholarship on the taxonomic sites of archives and museums. This is a literature that has grown exponentially since the scholarly re-embrace of the archive in the s, one defined by the “move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” that “gained currency . . . in a range of fields energized by that reformulation.” Eichhorn describes the archival turn as meeting a need for a grounding past in a neoliberal age where political agency has been effaced by ferocious entrepreneurialism. But still Eichhorn wonders if the turn has merely reinforced women’s role as archival subject, and not agent. Yet many continue to aspire to the very subject status that Eichhorn finds insufficient: for art historian Griselda Pollock, modernism itself is “a museal text that leaves the works by women” unknown. Marianne Hirsch describes a “need to question the very structure and conception of archives and the ways in which they institutionalise knowledge”; Pollock creates virtual collections showcasing the rarely seen ageing female body, or interrogating the complex history of the nude. Both counter taxonomic fictions with the genre of feminist fantasy, envisioning dynamic archives that reject mastery, nation, and movement in pursuit of new analytics, collections, and consignments. This work illuminates the quiet, insidious violence of exclusion, the daily, ritualized sacrifice of women’s endeavors and bodies that slowly accretes into gaping absence, a definitional unmooring. Although it inverts more than expands patriarchal designations, Gilman’s modernist feminist utopia foresees these politicized scholarly narratives. In Herland, where million women have existed in isolation for , years, male visitors are “exhibited” for inspection, are objectified through study, analysis, and widely disseminated reportage. Of the many perplexities of American culture, Herlanders are said to find the Christian veneration of individual “Sacrifice” the least comprehensible. But this judgment dissembles, as the sheer perfection of Gilman’s feminist utopia – its well-educated, disease-free women who run like deer and think like Enlightenment philosophers – is founded on a reverence for “the sacrament” of motherhood, a heritable purity sustained by generations of eugenic sacrifice. Abandoning nothing of Gilman’s
Feminism’s Archives
religiosity toward “superior” motherhood, Mina Loy’s disruption of patriarchal taxonomy is more immediate, more expressly violent. Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” () takes part in a -year-old genre that “defin[es] and enact[s] identities,” one that, like those aiming to rewrite archival structures, is subject to “the competing challenges of universalism and feminism.” Loy’s manifesto has been labeled many things: unfeminist, racist, eugenicist, (hetero)normative; derivative, ambivalent, shocking; it is said to fail and affirm. If it succeeds at all, it is in its acknowledgment of the interstitial space within which the category “women” subsists as sacrificable vestibule that Loy somatizes as the hymen, and then surgically, systematically destroys in front of a reader sexed female. Loy urges women to become complicit in their own mutilation; indeed, to embrace that mutilation as the only available form of liberation. More than any other, this passage is the sticking point of Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (see Figure .):
Figure . Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (), manuscript detail. Image downloaded from the Beinecke Digital Library, and used with kind permission from Roger Conover, Mina Loy’s editor and executor of the Mina Loy estate
Loy’s archived challenge to feminized categories – virtue, purity – is unsettling, extreme. There are many underlinings in this manuscript, which is replete with spacious, breathless dashes and unsystematic, emphatic lineation (“‘Manifesto’ holograph”). Perhaps inadvertently, certainly aptly, “virginity” is the only word struck through, as though redacted by Loy’s pen and the process it details. More than one critic considers “[t]he archival document [as] a tear in the fabric of time,” a work often unintended for memorialization, one that may become unaccountably central to a previously unimaginable history. Loy’s manifesto is such a document: her modest proposal began life as a private fiction, an epistolary exchange that she never intended for public consumption, yet has become one of her most notorious writings. Its publication is a recovery that speaks to a feminist revisioning of what constitutes worthy scholarship; it also raises questions – likely irresolvable, if rarely posed – about the unauthorized, posthumous publicizing of personal papers. But Loy’s archived tear is comprised of multiple incisions. Most obviously, what she called her “fragment of Feminist tirade” positions the female body beyond the circulation of patrimony by fragmenting the body, destroying the hymen as the singular gauge of women’s cultural value. Loy out-sacrifices the sacrificer, in this case, the society that condones a marriage ritual founded on the understanding that a husband will give lifelong “offerings” in return for the immolation of his wife’s virginity. Minus the hymen intact, this dubious contract is a slate wiped to reveal a blurry gendered future. Loy’s ritualized tear might foresee one of Derrida’s readings of the multivalent tympanum, a word whose etymology names part of a printing press. As component, the tympanum is feminine and masculine, a “framed cloth that watches over its margins as virgin,” an autonomous, penetrative thing that willfully “punctures itself, grafts itself” thus “resist[ing] the concepts of machine or of nature, of break or of body.” For Derrida, self-puncturing “resists the [Freudian] metaphysics of castration”; for Loy, self-puncturing resists the lived economy of virginity. In both instances, a fiercely examined (even decimated) vestibular cavity is positioned against a limiting history of somatized taxonomies. Contemplating her future in – a future marked by war, an unreliable husband and income, lovers imprisoned or furious, as well as the complex prospect of leaving her children for New York – Loy states with remarkably sanguinity: “I know I shall find my fitting hole.” Not wholeness, but interstitial cavity. As Loy wrote the “Feminist Manifesto,” she was volunteering in an Italian surgical hospital, her “mind . . . half the time immersed in
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wounds –.” More than any previous conflict, World War I is said to have been marked by the language of sacrifice and self-sacrifice; so often, the wound documents trauma, or the memory that remains unthinkable, unincorporable. Treating the sexed body as document – as negotiable contract, out to tender – Loy articulates a ritualized wounding, one whose origins are insistently unforgettable. Derrida makes a similar link in a text that likens the archive to Freud’s rendering of human memory and consciousness, one that traces archival origins to the Greek arkheion, or “the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.” The fever that archives generate is, in part, the insatiable desire for a return to origins, a desire writ large in psychoanalysis, where it is aligned with a longing for a return to the womb. Derrida knows that maternity is co-opted into paternity, that archons are patriarchs, “guardians of the archive and of the law.” Throughout Archive Fever, Derrida repeatedly acknowledges this silencing of female voice and identity. Yet he also traces out the lineage of male circumcision as archive: its Freudian link to identificatory castration complexes; its historical ties to Jewish exile; its mark that announces that for Jews, “‘the injunction to remember [is] felt as a religious imperative.’” For Derrida, the ritual sacrifice of the foreskin is an archive turned monument that is intergenerationally legible: “it leaves the trace of an incision right on the skin: more than one skin, at more than one age.” This incision is “the archive of a dissymmetrical covenant without contract”; the start of a Jewish boy’s commitment to the word of God, a fidelity that will be reaffirmed as puberty begins with the wearing of phylacteries, “those archives of skin or parchment that Jewish men, and not Jewish women, carry close to their body . . . right on the body, like the sign of circumcision.”. Jewish men, and not Jewish women. Can it be a complete coincidence that Loy, who wrote extensively about her Jewish patrilineage, inscribes the female body at the onset of puberty? Circumcision is said to be the world’s first and oldest voluntary surgical procedure, one performed for millennia on infants or boys entering adulthood. Loy’s manifesto decrees “the first self-enforced law for the female sex” as a self-imposed injury that protects, unites, creates a new tribe, a new future, perhaps a new intergenerational archive. A search for origins that literally begins at the entrance to the womb? Carolyn Steedman’s wry, pragmatic riposte to Derrida might prevent our falling headlong into this possibly too-fitting hole. For Steedman, “nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there.” Furthermore, archives should not be conflated with the expansive human memory because they are both too consciously selected
and too haphazard, subject to chance, loss, and “mad fragmentations.” The specific pocket of Loy’s papers rummaged through here is holed with loss: for starters, Loy’s correspondence with her friend, writer and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, runs only from to . Loy frequently casts Dodge as curator, sending manuscripts for her to peruse, discuss, and flog to publishers, asking for introductions to influential people, particularly galleries that might exhibit her art. But of the items Loy claims to send, few exist in these folders. Within the porous, limited confines of this archival sample there is much to glean, not least Loy’s pervasive resistance to taxonomies, her much-touted subversion of stable identities, which prompts her to use six different names in the valedictions of just over a dozen letters. This is the Loy we have come to know so well, the figure who strategically remained on the edges of paternalistic kinship groups – Futurism, Dada, Surrealism – that were never going to fully admit her into their inner circles. Loy worked the categorical, knew that shunning past order was an expedient way forward, as her poem “O Hell” testifies. “Our person is a covered entrance to infinity / Choked with the tatters of tradition,” Loy writes, commanding her reader to “bury the subconscious archives / Under unaffected flowers.” “O Hell” is part of Loy’s contribution to the inaugural issue of Contact in , and almost precisely describes Williams’s mandate to publish work unconcerned with legacies past and future, writing “‘that above all things . . . speak[s] for the present.’” Modernists loved to make it now, but the present, as Loy herself acknowledges, is frequently “a revolving chaos” over which only humanity’s most controlling believe they can impose an order. Order may be suspect, but we are unquestionably defined by “transgenerational memory,” be it archival, learned, or biological. A latemodernist writer and artist, Anna Mendelssohn is an inheritor of Loy’s archive as direct admirer, as writer and artist, as difficult, highly affective poet, and as avant-garde female. Born Anne Mendleson in northern England in , Mendelssohn was forever in pursuit of an aptonym, publishing variously over a period of thirty years as anonymous, Grace (Sylvia Louise) Lake, Anna Mendelssohn, and, very occasionally, c.n.e.m. b. h’k., the acronym of her Hebrew name, Channa Nechama Enna Krshner Mendleson Lubovitch bas Hakolenian. This list of pen names is not comprehensive. Loy’s dislike of taxonomy is Mendelssohn’s modus operandi: Mendelssohn defines self and art by negation, by arbitrariness. Endlessly preoccupied by women’s marginalization, Mendelssohn will not be aligned with “holy simpering feminists” (“two secs.”). A post-Holocaust Jew, she considers herself “neither white nor black,” a “native-born immigrant” (“in those
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days,” Music Died; Inscape). Englishness she shuns, writing in a letter: “I have always been an outsider in British society” (correspondence with Peter Riley). An inveterate student who railed against the university in her final exams, she lobbied to change her fails to “unclassified,” a nebulous status she maintained until her death. An avowed leftist, Mendelssohn redacted terms of direct political affiliation from her poem manuscripts. Author biographies usually list publications; one of Mendelssohn’s focuses on work she refused to publish (constant red). An artist steeped in post- continental aesthetics, she writes blithely, dismissively: “That was modernism. Oh doesn’t it slide just.” Her poems tell us how not to interpret art: “[W]hat my poem is not” is “a paean to enamelled futures” that “investigate [s] resemblances. types.” Further, paintings should not be read “as though they were rule books.” Wholly, obsessively devoted to art, Mendelssohn persistently rejects affiliative processes, terms, categories. As she succinctly puts it in one poem, she is: “Anti-art enough.” Mendelssohn had firsthand experience of the dangers of taxonomy. On December , , at the end of what was then the longest trial in British criminal history, she was convicted of conspiracy to cause explosions. Her well-substantiated plea of innocence failed to convince. In honor of the urban guerrilla cell with which she was briefly associated, the British press dubbed her “the Angry Brigade girl,” a tag she loathed, and saw resurrected in the media furor surrounding her early parole in (“what a poem”). Between and , Mendelssohn had three children who were desired and loved as the searing stigma attached to the label “single parent” was not. Enrolling as a student at the University of Cambridge in , Mendelssohn struggled with her health, finances, and academic ambitions. Formerly branded a criminal, Mendelssohn understandably feared returning to court when she became embroiled in a custody battle in the mid-s. Under numerous forms of duress, she reluctantly allowed her children to be fostered in , an arrangement that proved permanent. This was a loss from which Mendelssohn never recovered, even as she went on to compose fifteen volumes of poetry, and was anthologized by respected members of another inadequately named, paternalistic kinship group – the so-called British Poetry Revival – Denise Riley, Iain Sinclair, and Rod Mengham among them. Artistic recognition mattered enormously, but Mendelssohn never ceased to believe herself a taxonomic victim writ large. By extension, her poetry frequently alludes to sacrificial experience. Consider “The wrong room”: Make no demands of those you are about to sacrifice to the winds the white plume burnt in white fire, sacrifices, pressed space spare no devastating word, the lambs were safe, your curse travelled
having infected my ears with the sound of your hatred it was a word i did not want to hear. Must you hate? Must you change every girl into a president, into a politique? The sun never submits itself to the moon’s phases. Of light there is no higher tune. Everywhere enquiries flee.
Designation is incorrect; designation is violent; designation obliterates open-ended questioning. This vitriol burns. But Mendelssohn’s poems and life writings evince an equal and opposed sentiment, a pronounced longing for categories that liberate, that declare innocence and pronounce freedom from blame: exoneration, exculpation, acquittal. Mendelssohn existed within the fraught interstice of these contrary desires as creator and maintainer of a fragile, singular vestibularity whose confines exceeded ready observation. Unlike Loy, Mendelssohn was never confident of finding a fitting hole. When Mendelssohn died in , her children generously donated her voluminous, chaotic papers to Special Collections at the University of Sussex. Mendelssohn saved everything for posterity, from her elementary school notebooks to an enormous corpus of unsent letters, or correspondence that does not correspond with others or to standard category. Mendelssohn’s was an erudite, eclectic mind that generatively, restlessly followed impulse. But she was also a consummate archivist who sent ephemeral publications – unbound collections of drawings; hastily conceived pamphlets; documents torn, stained, visibly edited – to legal deposit libraries in London and Cambridge. These deposits include Mendelssohn’s own manifesto, yet another harbinger of a desire to secure an identity, to collate the self. This manifesto was handwritten on a single page in and details the founding of the MAMA movement (see Figure .). Not Dada, but Mama: Mendelssohn’s nomenclature broadcasts modernist allegiances and resistances. Manifestos tackling the category mother are a well-established avant-garde tradition: in , Valentine Saint-Point’s “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman” insisted that “innate” maternal qualities smothered society; in , Futurist Rosa Rosà argued in “Women of the Near Future” that maternality unduly shielded women and their children from the world. And in her “Feminist Manifesto” Loy contentiously states that women “of superior intelligence” should be sure to procreate in the same numbers as “the unfit or degenerate members of [their] sex.” Writ large, Loy’s aesthetics draw upon and dramatically invert the terms of Max Nordau’s Degeneration (), meaning her eugenicism can be read as another deliberately shocking satire
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Figure .
Anna Mendelssohn, “MAMA: womanifiasco numera una” ().
of taxonomic limitation. Writing as Herland is drafted, Loy shares Gilman’s eugenic awareness, if not her sincere tone. Nevertheless, both desire to turn women’s confinement into liberation; both elevate child rearing to a sacred task; both assert that offspring should result from women’s deliberated choice. As “there would be no future without repetition,” it is unsurprising that this first-wave feminist ethos feeds the consciousness-raising of the second. In Motherhood Reconsidered: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties, Lauri Umansky argues that second-wave feminists struggled against the unexamined misogyny of the New Left by proposing the family as a key site of women’s oppression. And in the early s, as women’s groups splintered over issues of race, class, and sexuality, “theorists pushed motherhood to the fore as a powerful universalizing issue.” Umansky maintains that maternality “cemented a fragmented movement,” and propelled the shift from radical to cultural feminism. But throughout the twentieth century, motherhood has been a politicized frontier alternately dystopian or utopian. Dystopian, as in the feminist guerrilla group WITCH (a.k.a. Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), who targeted Mother’s Day as a consumerist celebration of “‘sacrific[ing women] on the altar of reproduction.’” So too in “The Traffic in Women” does Emma Goldman assert that “moralists are prepared to sacrifice one-half of the human race” to maintain the institutions of marriage and family. Utopian, as in the “Women’s Liberation Movement Print Culture” archive collated by Duke University Libraries Digital Collections, which includes Jane Alpert’s “Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory.” A JewishAmerican leftist and extremist activist who bombed commercial and government buildings in New York in , Alpert published her manifesto in Ms. in August , or just as Anna Mendelssohn approached the second anniversary of her incarceration. Alpert writes while living underground, a fugitive due to her involvement with what she calls the “white left,” a faction run by “male supremacist[s].” Rejecting that political avant-garde, Alpert increasingly turns to feminist “theories of awakening consciousness, of creation and rebirth.” Alpert is an essentialist for whom women’s difference is radically, biologically determined; she believes that “the power of the new feminist culture, and the inner power . . . which is the soul of feminist art [is sourced] in none other than female biology: the capacity to bear and nurture children.” For Alpert, this capacity is housed in all women – child-bearing or not – as potential that must be tapped to reshape the family and society on gynocritical lines. Gilman would no doubt approve.
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Mendelssohn’s approach to parenthood blends dystopian and utopian, often within the confines of a single poem, as in: “i hate being a mother” and “if / you love your children you want to eat them up. I want to eat my / children up.” And she is no stranger to essentialism: mothers’ wombs are filled with “magic and [. . .] mystery,” their bodies a pristine counter to patriotic aggression: “There is no flag that stands pure flesh of mother / Pushed aside in times of peace.” The MAMA manifesto maintains Mendelssohn’s ambivalence from its very subtitle, which champions “womanifiasco numera una,” or a female defined by failing again and again, thus failing best. Echoing Vorticism, Mendelssohn cryptically tells us that separation – milk from cream, men from women, fathers from mothers? – is no illusion, but the work of a centrifuge. This technological turn is sustained in a reworking of postmodern irony, and perhaps woman as receptacle, whereby opposed beings “stare each other out in this prophetically ionized modern post-box”; technology recurs in her polite refiguring of the womb as a bowl in need of a surgical or anatomical cleanse: “Shall we sterilize the human basin?” Submission to technological aggression is what MAMA most resists: “‘Our revolutionary linguistic radical women poets are bulldozed into the sewers for their pacifist reluctance to transmute into military machines.’” For its violence, the patriarchy is under fire. “The west won to such an extent that Mama toy” Mendelssohn avers, lavishing scorn on those who would reduce womankind to plaything, among them, the “ORDAINED.” After all, “Who wants Desert Daddies”? To a sister or daughter is attributed the following dialogue (see Figure .). Where are our women, our possessions, the first line asks, its “wo’s” females homophonically contracted into acute sadness, the chorus of “se’s” suggesting ownerships untold and unlimited. The desire for “wo’s in their pinnies” speaks to the unacknowledged labor that enables only a select few to use “academical minds” and “intellectual hearts” – hence the paucity of black dons, female poets. This strangulating domesticity extends into an allusion to Ian Curtis, the Mancunian lead singer of the post-punk band Joy Division who hung himself with a washing line in . Working associatively, Curtis prompts the place name from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is Poe’s story detailing the double murder of a reclusive mother and daughter. Home exploits; too much home deadens. A validation of traditional motherhood this is not; instead, as the manifesto continues, we are immersed in a dystopia of chucked radishes and a woman who bakes not bread, but ornamental flowers, or violets cloisonnés, employing an ancient metalwork
Figure . Anna Mendelssohn, “MAMA: womanifiasco numera una” (), manuscript detail.
technique that requires intricate partitioning, enameling, and kiln firing. A maternal figure, in other words, who is an artist. Abstruse, dogmatic, comic, this manifesto is adorned by a drawing of breasts shooting milk like incendiary fireworks into its own text. Taxonomies of counter-identity, feminist manifestos are somatic. Proclaiming modernist affiliations, including the desire to be identified as a discrete, combative movement, the MAMA manifesto nevertheless insists upon its pacifism, its marginal, abject distinctness from the vanguardism by which it defines itself. Direct allegiances with Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” surface in its considerations of women’s intelligence, parenting (unfit or otherwise), forced sterility, and misogyny. But while Loy engages in a satiric, accusatory condemnation of victimized womanhood, Mendelssohn openly excoriates mankind, vehemently holds absentee males or “Desert Daddies” to account. In her correspondence, Mendelssohn speaks of appointing her daughter as MAMA’s co-directress, and promotes the plays she collectively produces with her offspring. Mendelssohn’s is a resolutely domesticated, unheroic twist on the conflation of art and life propounded by modernist vanguards. In his manifesto, Tristan Tzara infamously pronounces Dada “[a] hobby horse,” noting that “[s]ome learned journalists regard it as an art for babies.” In her MAMA manifesto, Mendelssohn argues that the West has only partly won its Mama toy,
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and that babies can indeed make art. MAMA is Mendelssohn’s refusal to acquiesce to Cyril Connolly’s maxim that the pram in the hallway is the enemy of good art, a platitude that implicitly informs so much of vanguard production. Further, MAMA may be Mendelssohn’s most replete participation in the vanguard dream that art can change the world, or in this case, the private sphere. This utopia did not go to plan. As Mendelssohn writes: “I created a world of art for my children / to live in. But I am required to / Leave my world of art & Repent.” Yet the movement remains a touchstone, one Mendelssohn continues to reference nearly a decade after her children are fostered, as evinced by the “MAMA ” that appears at the bottom of an archived typescript of her poem “antiphony.” Often hard to reach, slow in perusing, in the end, archives can almost give too much away. To paraphrase Woolf: all day, all night, the archival body intervenes. And this truth may be still more potent for women who reconfigure the category “mother” in laying claim to the title “artist.” Gilman was vilified by the press as an “‘unnatural mother’” because she and her ex-husband amicably agreed that he should raise their child; some twenty years later, she wrote a trilogy that elevated conscientious motherhood to a sacrament. Loy critics have expressed palpable dismay at her decision to leave her children in Florence while she traveled to New York in pursuit of a place at the avant-garde table, even as her husband’s simultaneous, protracted stay in the South Seas generates nary a ripple of consternation. As her critical legacy unfolds, Mendelssohn will no doubt be held to account as a parent as her male peers will not. That said, unpicking knotty motherhood is a focus of their writing. Loy’s and Mendelssohn’s archives hold documents that evince an uneasy mixing of generativities artistic and reproductive. Longing to produce art, both writers aestheticize their children and celebrate their capacity for aestheticization, but also lay the responsibility for an intergenerational severance – the physical departure of the parent – at the child’s feet. These complexities speak to the difficulties of maintaining the consuming roles of parent and artist; simultaneously, they illustrate the contortions requisite to escaping confines of established taxonomy. Loy’s fictionalized account of her departure from Italy has only been available to the public since , courtesy of the research archive deposited at the Beinecke by Loy’s feminist biographer, Carolyn Burke. Loy’s manuscript indicates unreservedly that what follows is “[a]bout Joella when leaving Florence for America,” yet her eldest daughter is demarcated by a pseudonym: the piece is titled “Alda’s Beauty.” An artist making a name for herself, Loy narrates how her love for Joella-cum-Alda, and the
pain of leaving her, are inseparable from an appreciation of her physical beauty. Loy begins by lingering over Alda’s features, her eyes, lips, skin, blueish temples, and “hair golden”; the intensity of this portrait will recur in miniature on the day she departs, when “Alda [is] framed in the window of the railway carriage – the coiled wisps of corn-coloured hair blowing about the unbelievable blue of the innocence of her eyes.” A “sturdy leg[ged],” unnamed son is there too, clearly secondary. But even before this departure takes place, the narrator labors to create distance, mingling aesthetics with anesthesia. Alda’s beauty, we are told, like all beauty, is “ever a surreality that perturbs our response with the indefinable clairvoyance of a dream.” And then an incision slices through the luxuriant detail: “A dream come true – and I must run away from it for safeguard –” Not to safeguard, but for: whose protection is at stake? Is Alda, born to the narrator, now too beautiful to be borne? A cacophony of confused affect follows this cut: there is “gripping panic,” exhaustion, and long-standing “anguish.” Equanimity returns when a consul at the passport office asks Alda if she will miss her beautiful big sister, an error memorable because flattering; on the typescript, Loy adds a note stating that Alda was furious that she absentmindedly paid twice for her visa. Collectively, these details suggest a fraught narrator trying to shore up the fragments of her maternal ruins. Along the way, Alda’s beauty is deemed a catalyst for a departure over which she has no control, a departure that is high risk in more ways than one: Loy’s voyage to New York will be pockmarked with German U-boats, and the Italy she leaves behind is actively embattled. “Alda’s Beauty” speaks to the risks and losses Loy undertook to maintain artistic equilibrium, but it also prompts a rethinking of the role of parents gendered female, an uncolloquial turn of phrase I deploy deliberately. As I do so, I note that in the “Feminist Manifesto” Loy uses “mother” only twice, in reference to the false binary of “mother” or “mistress” that is imposed upon women. When the manifesto turns to an ideal reproductive future, the term “mother” does not appear where expected, as in: “Woman must become more responsible for the child than the man –.” Often, Loy herself was not where mothers are expected to be; that said, she was always the parent most responsible for her children. And when Joella took her own voyage to New York in the s, leaving Loy on the docks on the French coast, she addresses a letter to not “mother” but “darling, dearest Mina,” observing: “it was the saddest thing . . . that I ever experienced seeing you growing gradually smaller and smaller –.” This letter testifies to the significance, and perhaps also the necessity, of orchestrated maternal diminishments.
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Mendelssohn’s departure tale is embedded in the poem “Abschied,” German for “farewell.” “Abschied” is dedicated to her eldest child, who has eight names, consistent with Mendelssohn’s pursuit of aptonyms. Like Loy, Mendelssohn paints a portrait of a child who will bear early the weight of adulthood, a beautiful girl adorned with “lovely honey hair.” The poem begins: A young child cannot reply. One does not compare. Or crooked turn the lines against the sunrise By tonight I shall have lost you because I cannot hold you & be anything but abused how can anyone tell of what they do not know These great, strident images that cannot be read for their content Abuse stings & smarts my daughter of the last night. Even that then, surrounded by deep cushions, fitted in to a neat myth in the endless memory within which we are placed beside & to each side of each other. but what a pity that it should mean anything as though the autumn did not return a spring.
This is a poem that extends its wounds to the reader, who can hardly fail to be cut to the quick by the immediacy and directness of the parent who states so calmly, so simply: “By tonight I shall have lost you.” What this parent lacks is an ancient, all-powerful maternality, the power to reverse time – “turn crooked the lines / against the sunrise” – to be Demeter, the heroic rescuer who welcomes Persephone home each spring. That myth of motherhood neither fits nor cushions this blow. Like Loy’s narrator, the speaker casts around for explanations: it is the abuse of others – “strident” feminists? – that makes it impossible for her to take on her role with ease; she speaks worriedly of her daughter’s back “spurred / by an anomalous blast / of old poisoned rhetoric.” This is a judgment keenly felt, and one from which art neither protects nor deflects. Art has not saved us, Mendelssohn asserts,
not from predators “costumed in foliage / unknown to botany”; not from a “Master of Terms” whose regulations prove a fiction; not from ourselves. Note that the first two of these three figures inhabit challenges to the strictures of taxonomy. By extension, the description of ourselves proves far too categorical. For Mendelssohn’s conclusion cuts deeply: But what could we do You and I You had already captured The art of departure Beautifully
Mendelssohn’s is often an angry, even furious, oeuvre, but this conclusion contains among the most vicious of her lines. Art did not save us, but you, child, have saved yourself with an art that takes you from me. As is Alda, this child is said to catalyze a parental departure, and this accusation is among the only certainties in this poem, which otherwise seeks to justify, to acquiesce to a world that exceeds order and explanation. Like Loy before her, Mendelssohn figures the problem as a surfeit of artifice, a too-great aesthetic impact and prowess. Offspring absorbs the artistic capacity that can take precedence over parenting, and the child is then blamed, on aesthetic grounds, for the separation that ensues, even as that very artistry is presented as consolation. Derrida asks: “What about a neutral genre/ gender?” And plumps for a neutrality that is “doubly affirmative.” In Mendelssohn’s “Abschied,” the resolutely female, overdetermined category “mother” is doubly negative, irreparably wounding two generations with an incisive, revealing authorial command that only worsens the maternal decimation that sunset portends. In Mendelssohn’s archive, one draft of “Abschied” includes a second part, a poem that will later be treated as a distinct entity. From stanza one, this poem addresses identificatory marginalizations: In my dogbox I happen to dislike the analogy to olives in my bitch chapel of knights ancestral calipers madame writes on the skull of a dead jew the fruits of her prophesy succoring crimean luxury inventing literality
This stanza invites a re-reading of “Abschied”: its German title; the “lovely honey hair / chopped up into boyhood,” and damaging “old poisoned
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rhetoric.” Calipers were tools used to conduct the Nazi Mischling test, the racial taxonomy legalized by the Nuremburg Laws of ; Crimea was posited as a potential Jewish homeland twice in the twentieth century, plans that never came to fruition, remaining an “invent[ed] literality.” The loss of a child now takes on a monumental historical cast, one tied not only to the feminized speaker-turned-canine’s inability to strike out on a knightly quest for justice or reconciliation by olive branch fiat, but also to a Jewish legacy that looms large in Mendelssohn’s second-generation psyche, one continually subject to what Hirsch labels “postmemory.” This is an intersectional victimization involving sex, race, and creed. And as in “Abschied,” art cannot mitigate; as the poem concludes, Mendelssohn bitterly states: “the counterfeit in art / continues to mark progress.” While Mendelssohn uncouples these stanzas from “Abschied,” her archive shows her, like Derrida, lingering over the possibility that for Jews, “‘the injunction to remember [is] felt as a religious imperative.’” A Jewish artist, Mendelssohn’s work is subsumed by memory: a poem that begins with the name of her third child hopes not to “remember what did pass for hurt” but asks: “but who are you, tissue, to be needled so young?” Mendelssohn’s speaker tries “to remember / when there was no punishment” but concludes by enfolding the child she longs to protect into her pain: “we must suffer. it is hard.” “The aim of the artist is to miss the Absolute,” writes Mina Loy. Mendelssohn knows this too, knows that no artistic legacy can adequately subsume or vindicate past losses and victimizations, past categories, even as the hundred linear shelf feet of her archive result, in part, from a lived, daily desire to do precisely that. * If taxonomies are somatic, archives are bodies that breathe, stutter, beguile, entangle, combat, haunt, hunt, elude, run feral, and die. Archival documents can bleed copiously, demand our assessment, our urgent discernment: “Whatever the project is, work in the archives requires a triage, a separation of documents.” Foucault envisions the archive as that which neither traps nor preserves, collects nor resurrects, but is a system of enunciability, one that does not diagnose “the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions” but instead “establishes that we are difference.” Difference is Foucault’s counter to the search for origin; difference is a “dispersion that we are and make.” Foucault’s difference sits between “totalities and teleologies,” but it also proliferates. Derrida’s polysemic différance is similarly grounded in the interstitial, toward an “interval” that is not “a hole with indeterminable borders.” Doing his
utmost to escape category, Derrida is aware that “the thematic of différance may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded,” sacrificed to a grouping, “a chain that in truth it never will have governed.” Taxonomy leads always to sacrifice. But while différance continues to strategize and play, feminist theorists will make good use of it for “the making and unmaking of relational, provisional, necessary but unstable meanings around something deeply central to human self-consciousness and desire . . . [and] to social, economic and cultural organisation.” This longing to occupy foundational fissures is the resounding drive behind Kristen Bluemel and Phyllis Lassner’s bid for a feminist “intermodernism,” one that acknowledges late nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers who were not card-carrying, monocle-wearing vanguardists, but who nevertheless had something relevant to say. Like so many women before them – Rosa Manus, Zora Neale Hurston, Nancy Cunard – contemporary feminists aim to liberate through intense curatorship, to demarcate the knowledge and history pocketed away within coherent, observable sets of social classifications, their hierarchies suspiciously intact. The call to recategorize is everywhere. We might, for instance, read the following from Derrida as a commentary not on psychoanalytically defined ego, but on the fate of marginalized identities that have escaped archival notice: suppose that the contradiction between the act of memory or of archivization on the one hand and repression on the other remains irreducible. As if one could not, precisely, recall and archive the very thing one represses, archive it while repressing it . . . that is to say, to archive otherwise, to repress the archive while archiving the repression; otherwise, of course, and that is the whole problem, than according to the current, conscious, patent modes of archivization.
This is interstice as crossroads, as unyielding pocket: subjugation cancels out preservation, exploration, and memorialization. How to archivize differently? This is the work of expansivity and interstitiality, terms that bear likeness to the temporal and spatial broadening inherent in the new modernist studies, and the “vertical” dismantling of cultural hierarchy that constitutes a reconfiguration, a seeing anew, of difference. As “women’s spaces are gradually being eroded” the new modernist studies can and must make room for feminist scholarship, not least because both categories are united in being “built to survive what has been built.” Radical cataloging is a variant of archival expansiveness. The Library of Congress Classification system was established in ; more than sixty
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years later the politics of its categorization came under scrutiny from an assistant librarian working at the University of Zambia, who noted that “kaffir” remained on the listings; that feminism was inadequately identified; and that lesbianism was listed under “sexual perversion.” A feminist task force for the American Library Association took up this call, and radical cataloging began in earnest, continually updating and adding to the taxonomic roster, broadening the rules of engagement. Expansiveness fosters interstitiality, as when renegade cataloger Joanna Freedman, a librarian at New York’s Barnard Zine Library, approached individual authors, so often self-identifying as anonymous or under a pseudonym, and asked how or even if they wanted to be identified on the public catalog. Interstitiality is writ large in Ann Cvetkovich’s archive of feelings, a record of the internalities of affect, that is detailed in a book that “lies between the queer and the lesbian, not quite occupying either category comfortably.” Cvetkovich attends to interstitial absences and minutiae: the “invisibility that surrounds intimate life, especially sexuality,” that proves conducive to the repression of LGBT+ archives, and the ephemera that constitute that very history, such as match book covers from gay bars, items that might be dismissively categorized as “miscellaneous.” Interstitiality generates expansiveness: as Joan Nestle, a founder of New York’s Lesbian Herstory Archives affirms, her institution challenges the secrecy behind sexuality, and as such, welcomes the story of every woman who identifies as a lesbian. Similarly, Sara Ahmed attests that every feminist life “becomes an archive of rebellion.” If subject is archive, so too does the archive reflect identity: the extension of category represented by, for instance, the intersectional turn; the self-reflexive, internal examinations undertaken by marginalized, politicized kinship groups. As Derrida reminds us, transgenerational memory or archive retains its hold on the individual psyche; how we register that memory is as important as the memory itself. Claire Colebrook considers modernism a movement that needed to bludgeon the historical literary archive to death in order to “allo[w] new archival forces to emerge,” forces that would, ideally, embody “life’s original, animating, and fertile voice.” As we know, that embodiment was often played out through some of the oldest categories of all: woman as whore, virgin, mother. The demand to refigure this tenacious misogynist taxonomy is passed down from one generation to another, from modernist to late modernist, from Mina Loy to Anna Mendelssohn. Ironically, the acme of taxonomic prowess that is the archive is a lens through which to conduct that refiguring. Paradoxically,
by “collect[ing woman] like an unknown plant or exotic species” and “exhibit[ing] her features as a body would be displayed” we might begin the task of freeing women from “a simple, rigid ‘reproduction’ of her manners and dress that would freeze her in time, a motionless portrait.” In its ferocious examination of spaces within and around the body, or between bodies, this process is not without its punctures, aggressions, and complicities. For if the archive is a place of fantasy, “a place of dreams,” it is also a place of nightmare. Nevertheless, as Foucault tells us, the archive does enunciate, and this refusal of silencing is paramount. “[T]oday she would like to speak,” Mendelssohn states by way of concluding a poem, adding: “the fear of His fury returns.” As counter to this male silencing, the poem begins with a speculative, quotidian list that intersperses objects denoting accounts-keeping, sustenance, and display: “Ham banks counter machines slicers grills pockets drawers [ . . . ] tins of peas. jars of marmalade. ledgers. plexiglass. [ . . . ] local museums full of tablecloths. stuffed stoats.” These may be “words shorn of love”; they may illustrate a speaker “swept along, losing her world,” but they are also a highly individualized taxonomy, a telling range of possibility. Pockets, drawers, ledgers, museums: the division between us and the archive is as thin as membrane, a pane of plexiglass.
Notes Before the nineteenth century, women’s pockets were akin to detachable pouches or money belts, and were often worn beneath their clothing (“A History of Pockets.” Victoria and Albert Museum website, vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/history-of-pockets/). A recent study of top-selling American denim brands revealed that only percent of women’s jean pockets fit what the study’s authors consider female hands; for men, the result was percent. Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas, “Someone Clever once said Women were not Allowed Pockets,” The Pudding (August ), pudding.cool///pockets/. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (London: The Women’s Press, ), , . Ibid., . The women of Herland ask countless questions about the world beyond their nation. Our narrator is amazed at their responses: “They never expressed horror or disapproval, nor indeed much surprise – just a keen interest. And the notes they made! – miles of them!” (Gilman, Herland, ). Gilman, Herland, . Charlotte Perkins Gilman, With Her in Ourland (Rookhope, UK: Aziloth Books, ) , . Ourland is thick with descriptions of Ellador’s learning and organizing. The Herlander mind is typed as one that “promptly hung [new
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information] in the right places, like arranged things in a large, well-planned, not over-filled closet, and . . . knew where to find them all at once” (). Ibid., , . Jacques Derrida. “The Law of Genre,” tr. Avital Ronell, Glyph (), . Judith Roof, What Gender Is, What Gender Does (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Ibid., . Derrida, “Law,” . Ibid., . Alan Bass, notes to Margins of Philosophy, by Jacques Derrida, tr. Alan Bass (Brighton, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ), xvii. Noting that in the seventeenth century, a “new privilege [was] accorded to observation,” Foucault asserts that natural history is founded upon “the organization of a certain visible existence as a domain of knowledge,” one that drove the Swiss botanist Linnaeus’s classificatory system (emphasis mine). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Taylor and Francis, ), , . Most commonly defined as “foyer” or front hall, translator Alan Bass explores the Latin etymology of “vestibulum” as referring to a “place in which things are held,” derived from vestis, or “an entryway in which the Romans left the toga” (Bass, Notes to Margins, xvii). Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October (), . Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), , . Stoler’s work attends to individuals labeled “Inlandsche kinderen – a term that could designate mixed bloods, Indies born Dutch, and poor whites” or “a category that neither colour nor race could readily or reliably contain” (–). This grouping generates “epistemic uncertainty” and long paper trails (). Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . To Spivak’s supposition we might add the following, from Carolyn Steedman: “the modern European public archive came into being in order to solidify and memorialise first monarchical and then state power.” Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), . Marianna Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. Quoted in Torgovnik, Gone Primitive, Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October (), –. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October (), . In “Fantasia of the Library,” Foucault argues that Manet created “‘museum’ paintings, [or] the first paintings in European art that were less a response to [past] achievement . . . than an acknowledgement . . . of the new and substantial relationship of painting to itself, as a manifestation of the existence of museums and the particular reality and interdependence that paintings
acquire in museums. . .. Flaubert is to the library what Manet is to the museum.” Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, tr. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), , . Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . Ibid., , . Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA . (), . Introducing a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, “Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism,” Fernald argues that “one hallmark of the New Modernist Studies has been its lack of serious interest in women writers,” and points to the twenty-year-long failure of its flagship journal, Modernism/modernity, to offer special issues on a woman writer or feminist theory. Anne E. Fernald, “Women’s Fiction, New Modernist Studies, and Feminism,” Modern Fiction Studies . (), –. Fernald features in a subsequent Modernism/modernity online forum entitled “Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Practice” (), where she is joined by critics who echo her concerns. Urmila Seshagiri’s introduction juxtaposes the plethora of feminist texts that surfaced in the s – among them, Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ) and Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ) – against the absence of women authors and feminism from major modernist companions and handbooks through the s. Urmila Seshagiri, “Introduction: Mind the Gap! Modernism and Feminist Praxis,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus . (August , ), https://doi.org/./mod.. Further contemporary discussions of modernist scholarship include “Feminist Criticism Today: In Memory of Nellie Y. McKay,” PMLA . (), and “The Future of Women in Modernism,” Literature Compass . (). In the latter’s introductory essay, “Lessons Learned,” Pamela L. Caughie states that “feminist scholars . . . have been concerned about their place in an emerging field, the new modernist studies, whose definition, like feminism’s, is constantly, and prematurely, being contested and negotiated” (). Introducing the inaugural issue of Feminist Modernist Studies, a journal responsive to these concerns, editor Cassandra Laity similarly decries the lack of “a fullscale, feminist modernist recovery” since the inception of the new modernist studies. Cassandra Laity, “Editor’s Introduction: Toward Feminist Modernisms,” Feminist Modernist Studies .– (), . In fact, the very field that Mao and Walkowitz celebrate as a harbinger of the new modernist studies, transnational or global modernisms, is a point of contention for feminist scholars, who feel that this growth has both benefited and overshadowed women’s writing. With gains in view, see Jane Garrity on Susan Stanford Friedman, and modernists Mansfield, Rhys, and Marston: Jane Garrity, “Modernist Women’s Writing: Beyond the Threshold of Obsolescence,” Literature Compass . (), –. Regarding promotion and
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overlooking, see Seshagiri, and Scott, “Modernism and Gender,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin Dettmar (Oxford: Blackwell, ), –. On feminism as facilitator of the transnational turn, see Laity, “Editor’s Introduction,” . Max Brzezinski, “The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?” Minnesota Review (), –. Naomi Zack, Inclusive Feminism: A Third Wave Theory of Women’s Commonality (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, ), . Naomi Zack writes that “critiques of white feminism have resulted in segregated feminisms. But intellectual segregation is not a solution to inequality, any more than demographic segregation is” (Inclusive Feminism, ). Zack promotes a return to an agreed-upon universal condition of womanhood to facilitate a coherent, third-wave feminist agenda. This universality is discernible in Jane Garrity’s argument on behalf of retaining the category “woman’s writing,” and in a discussion of the generative disruption that so-called minor women writers – often of color – can exert upon a “hegemonic feminism” that Sonita Sarker does not aim to dispel, but to transform. Sonita Sarker, “On Remaining Minor in Modernisms: The Future of Women’s Literature,” Literature Compass . (), . Bonnie Kime Scott, introduction to The Gender of Modernism, . Along with theorization, feminist scholarship begins in archives, be they institutional or personal. This work flourished post–World War II, and scholars continue to consider it fundamental. See Fernald, “Women’s Fiction,” –; Garrity, “Modernist Women’s Writing,” ; and Laity, “Editor’s Introduction,” . See also Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, “The Spirit of Revolt: Women Writers, Archives and the Cold War,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus . (August , ), https://doi.org/./mod., and . In addition to the legions of overlooked female-authored texts published by presses such as Virago and Dalkey Archive, exemplary archive-based criticism includes Hilary Spurling’s Ivy: The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett (London: Faber and Faber, ) and Ulla Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises, – (with William Rice, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ). Tellingly, the word “matrimony” is as determined by paternalism as “patrimony.” Hence my deference to “matrilineage,” even as it fails to reference the ownership inherent to patrimony. Ironically, although wartime paucity shut down the WCWA, it had actively collected and preserved at-risk documentation from European women. The collection was ultimately returned to donors and dispersed to college libraries. Kate Eichhorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), , . The activist founder of the IAV, Rosa Manus, was murdered in Auschwitz in or Ravensbru¨ck in , but a significant portion of the IAV collection fell into the hands of the Red Army, and it was eventually repatriated to Amsterdam, where it is now known as Aletta, Institute for Women’s History (Eichhorn, Archival Turn, , ).
With a focus on the unsung archivist, Elizabeth Shepherd traces a specifically British, feminist archival history, detailing how, in World War I, women in England first received archival training at the London School of Economics. Many founded archives and preserved threatened documents now perceived as central to British history. Elizabeth Shepherd, “Hidden Voices in the Archives: Pioneering Women Archivists in Early th-Century England,” in Engaging with Records and Archives: Histories and Theories, ed. Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mak, and Gillian Oliver (London: Facet, ), –. Quoted in Eichhorn, Archival Turn, –. Seventy years on, Griselda Pollock almost precisely repeats the terms of the WCWA pamphlet: “Archives matter. What is included shapes forever what we think we were and hence what we might become. The absence of women’s histories in world archives has defined a vision of the human on the pattern of a privileged masculinity. Humanity’s self-definition requires a challenge to that vision.” Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space, and the Archive (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, ), . Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, . Eichhorn, Archival Turn, -. Ibid., Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual, . Arlette Farge considers the pursuit of the female subject in the archive an urgent task: The Allure of the Archives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), –. Stoler describes how “‘male prowess’” determined archiving, historiography, and its occlusion of the “agentive” female subject (Along the Archival Grain, ). And Shepherd writes: “Archives relating to women’s lives were not considered worthy of preservation or, if preserved, were confined to the ‘w – women’ index entry” (“Hidden Voices,” ). Marianne Hirsch, “Feminist Archives of Possibility,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies . (), . Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual, . Hirsch’s article is set in a fantasy world; Pollock’s text generates a “virtual feminist museum” that “cannot be realised” and is intended ironically, because “[t]he dominant social and economic power relations that govern the museum . . . make feminist analysis impossible” (). Gilman, Herland, . Ibid., . This resistance to the foundational role of sacrifice recurs in With Her in Ourland (), where it is a concept Ellador dismisses as “‘so ancient’” (). Herland experiences two sacrificial eras. Originating as a polygamous, slaveowning society, Herland became isolated due to a volcanic eruption that cut it off from the world entire. In the period that followed, the slave class killed all the male masters, “even to the youngest boy,” and found themselves slain in turn by an enraged female populace (Gilman, Herland, ). The second era is eugenicist and ongoing. After an initial, harrowing period of “negative
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eugenics” in response to scarce resources, a considered decision was taken to disallow “underbred” or unfit women to reproduce (Gilman, Herland, ). Janet Lyon, “On the Asylum Road with Woolf and Mew,” Modernism/ modernity . (September ), , . On racism and eugenicism, see Aimee L. Pozorski, “Eugenicist Mistress and Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism, –,” Melus . (), –. On heteronormativity and failure, see Lyon, “On the Asylum Road,” , , and . On derivativity and responsivity, see Roger Conover, appendices to The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, by Mina Loy (Manchester: Carcanet, ), ; and Tim Hancock “‘You couldn’t make it up’: The Love of ‘Bare Facts’ in Mina Loy’s Italian Poems,” English: Journal of the English Association . (), . On shock and ambivalence, see Sarah Hayden, Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), –, . On gender affirmation, see Alex Goody, “Ladies of Fashion/Modern(ist) Women: Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes,” Women: A Cultural Review . (), ; Virginia M. Kouidis, Mina Loy: Modernist American Poet (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), ; Mary E. Galvin, Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ), ; and Helen Jakoski, “Mina Loy Outsider Artist,” Journal of Modern Literature . (), . Farge, Allure of the Archives, . Spivak describes “the epistemic story of imperialism” as “a repeated tearing of time that cannot be sutured” (Critique of Postcolonial Reason, ). Archives are frequently posited as wounded bodies, as collections of “raw traces” (Farge, ) or “material . . . definitively cut adrift” (Francis Gooding, “At the Riverbank: Sediments and Sentimentality in ‘The Archive,’” Critical Quarterly . [], ). Steedman likens the archival researcher to a pickpocket who “always reads an unintended, purloined letter” (Dust, ); Farge compares the historian’s “approach . . . to a prowler’s” (Allure of the Archives, ). These mentions of archival intrusiveness are typically brief. Mina Loy, Undated letter, Folder . Mina Loy, “Feminst Manifesto,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, ed. Roger Conover (Manchester: Carcanet, ), . Bass, Notes to Margins, xxviii–xxviii. Loy, Undated letter, Folder . Loy, Undated letter, Folder . Derek Hughes, Culture & Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature & Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, tr. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Ibid., . Ibid., .
Ibid., . Ibid., , . David Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, ), xiii, . Steedman, Dust, . Ibid., . Loy’s letters suggest that she sent Mabel Dodge the play “The Pamperers” and her tract “Auto-Facial-Construction”; she offers to post another play, “Sacred Prostitute.” An unnamed document that sparked Dodge’s disapproval is also discussed. Unlike the “Feminist Manifesto” and two early poems, none of this work resides in Dodge’s archive. The plays are in Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, ed. Sara Crangle (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, ). “Auto-Facial Construction” appears in The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Loy’s prolific “use of anagrams, pseudonyms, and . . . renaming” is a foundational tenet of Loy criticism: see Alex Goody, “Gender, Authority, and the Speaking Subject, or: Who Is Mina Loy?,” How : In Conference, asu.edu/ pipercwcenter/howjournal/archive/online_archive/v__/current/inconference/mina-loy/goody.html. In her letters to Mabel, a.k.a. “Moose,” Loy self-identifies as Mina, Mina Loy, Mrs. Haweis, Mina Lloyd, Dusie, and Doose (Loy, Undated and dated letters, Folders and ). Loy, Lost, . Conover, appendices to Lost, . This quote is taken from “Pazzarella,” Loy’s satiric “vindication of feminine psychology” that concludes with the male protagonist deluding himself that he can order, organize, and thus recreate his female lover. Loy, Selected, . Derrida, Archive, . Lynne Harries, “The Northern Debutante: A Memoir of Anna Mendelssohn,” master’s thesis, University of East Anglia, , –. SxMs// A/, Anna Mendelssohn Archive. University of Sussex Special Collections, Falmer, UK. Sara Crangle, “Fleurs du travail, fleurs sublimes: Anna Mendelssohn’s Involute Tulips,” Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, forthcoming. Anna Mendelssohn (as Grace Lake), Spinsters and Mistresses of Art, unpublished MSS, c. –, SxMs//A/, Anna Mendelssohn Archive, University of Sussex Special Collections, Falmer, UK. Anna Mendelssohn (as Grace Lake), “London, ,” in Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador, ), –. Anna Mendelssohn (as Grace Lake), “Silk & Wild Tulips,” in Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, ed. Maggie O’Sullivan (St. Leonard’s On Sea, UK: Reality Street Editions, ). From the poem beginning “But that wasn’t what.” Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (Cambridge: Folio/Equipage, ). In Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems, ed. Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, ), .
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Mendelssohn’s interstitiality is the subject of my article “The Agonies of Ambivalence: Anna Mendelssohn, la poétesse maudite,” in “Weak Theory,” special issue, Modernism/modernity . (), –. Numerous photocopies of the manifesto exist in the Anna Mendelssohn Archive at Sussex; a copy is also held at London’s British Library. The image shown here is the original, used with thanks to the Mendelssohn estate, and located in Sussex Special Collections (SxMs//B//). Loy, Lost, . For Loy, children should follow “a definite period of psychic development in [a woman’s] life” (Lost, ); in Herland, women are “Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity . . . but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People” (Gilman, Herland, ). Derrida, Archive, . Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (New York: New York University Press, ), . Ibid., , . Ibid., . Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing),. Jane Alpert, Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory (), , , library.duke. edu/digitalcollections/wlmpc_wlmms/. Ibid., . Ibid., . Mendelssohn (as Grace Lake), poem beginning “to have some stupid bloke laughing and giggling at you,” constant red/mingled damask (), unpaginated. From the poem beginning “Poetry is the lack,” in Implacable Art. Despite consulting with five of Mendelssohn’s associates, I remain defeated by some turns of phrase in “MAMA,” including “Rovvy on the bleep”; “Wimpy is Prune,” and “Our ex-steelworker poets are beaten up by their aggressors.” See letter dated September , , to Peter Riley and another dated May , , to Andrew Duncan; Mendelssohn also laments the too-abrupt truncation of MAMA. Tristan Tzara, “Seven Dada Manifestoes,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, ), . Mendelssohn, poem beginning “But that wasn’t what.” From “On Being Ill,” Woolf’s quote reads: “All day, all night the body intervenes.” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. , –, ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth, ), –. Ann J. Lane, introduction to Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (London: The Women’s Press, ), xii. These papers are a testament to feminist scholarship and offer extraordinary insight into the making of Loy’s legacy. Burke devoted two decades of her life
to uncovering the coordinates of Loy’s life. The attention to detail, the immediacy of her contact with many of Loy’s still-living peers, and the thinking behind each chapter of the biography are all evident in these files, which few scholars would so generously make available. Mina Loy, “Alda’s Beauty, Autograph manuscript, ,” YCAL MSS , Box , Carolyn Burke Collection on Mina Loy and Lee Miller, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, , . “Alda’s,” . “Alda’s,” . Loy was attentive to prepositions. Her famous poem sequence is titled “Songs to Joannes”: not a sentimental “for” but a combative “to,” a distinction foreshadowing the satire of the poetry that follows. “Alda’s,” . Arriving in New York, the narrator is greeted by none other than Mabel Dodge, thus bringing “Alda’s Beauty” to a close and my own forage through pockets of Loy’s papers full circle. Dodge appears as “Gloria,” Loy’s fictional name for her friend. In the story “Gloria Gammage,” Loy details Dodge’s many questionable behaviors, including her tendency to “stuf[f]” palaces “with things bought in the hurry of a woman with taste” and likewise, “to stuff everything into her vulva to see what marvellous creative modifications it had undergone in the process” (Loy, Selected, –). In the context of this essay, the latter activity reads as the creation of an interstitial archive of material returned to quintessential sites of origin. Loy, Lunar, . Ibid., . This mode of address appears typical of Joella Bayer’s correspondence to Loy. The need for this diminishment is evidently mutual; elsewhere, Loy writes: “The impulse of the child is towards the negation of the parent” (Selected, ). Anna Mendelssohn (as Grace Lake), Tondo Aquatique (Cambridge: Equipage, ), unpaginated. Derrida, “Law,” . Anna Mendelssohn (as Grace Lake), “Hungary Water,” in Tondo Aquatique. Mendelssohn’s parents lived in England throughout World War II, during which Mendelssohn’s mother cared for children evacuated from German concentration camps. Hitler is often described in Mendelssohn’s psyche and work in terms that accord with the experience of second-generation Holocaust survivors, including “‘transposition’” of past into present, as well as bodily symptoms, particularly overwhelming affect (Hirsch, Postmemory, –). Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi quoted in Derrida, Archive, . Anna Mendelssohn, “Rose-Gazing,” in Poets on Writing, ed. Denise Riley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . Loy, Selected, .
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These terms are drawn from my reading of Arlette Farge’s lush descriptive prose where she implicitly, repeatedly posits the archive as a body that is alive, “in need of taming” and combing; as an adverse predator, and as a being marked by “stutters and silences” (Farge, Allure of the Archives, , , , , , ). Farge, Allure of the Archives, . Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Oxford: Routledge, ), –. Ibid., . The essay is “Différance.” Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Brighton, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ), , . Ibid., . Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual, . Kristen Bluemel and Phyllis Lassner, “Feminist Inter/Modernist Studies,” Feminist Modernist Studies .– (). For a discussion of Manus, see endnote . On Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological archive, see David Murray’s Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Belief (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). Braddock discusses Cunard’s Negro as a politicized record of modernist race relations (Collecting, –). Derrida, Archive, . Mao and Walkowitz, “New Modernist Studies,” –. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Eichhorn, Archival Turn, . See Eichhorn’s chapter “Radical Cataloguers and Accidental Archivists,” –. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Ibid., . Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, . Claire Colebrook, “The Joys of Atavism,” in Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism, ed. Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison (London: Bloomsbury, ), . Farge, Allure of the Archives, . Steedman, Dust, . From the poem beginning “Ham banks counter machines slicers grills pockets drawers.” Anna Mendelssohn (as Grace Lake), The Day the Music Died (Cambridge: Equipage, ), unpaginated.
Risk’s Instruments Speculation, Futurity, and Modernist Finance Gayle Rogers
In , the new journal Art World lamented in an editorial headline that “Modernism and Politics Play Havoc with Art.” “Modernism” here is a term of severe opprobrium, but not on the grounds that we might expect. The journal warned readers not to follow the path of “art speculators and corrupt dealers” who had been “misled by the noise made in the press by the modernistic party in Paris,” where buyers “gambled on the future value of their creations as they might gamble in wheat and pork.” The sin of modernism, in other words, was part and parcel of the tangled world of modern markets, where art auctions in France operated like commodities exchanges in Chicago, and vice versa – and where media hype and insider whispers drove wild spikes in both price and prestige. Speculation replaced detached judgment, the guardians of culture claimed; frenzy and fever replaced studied aesthetic valuation. The Parisian bookseller Adrienne Monnier, who helped launch James Joyce’s Ulysses () as a speculative commodity, would confess to exactly this sin with a hint of pride in : she wrote that she, Sylvia Beach, and others “behaved ourselves rather badly. We made books objects of speculation; we made or let be made a stock exchange for books. Ah! we have not chased the money changers from the temple!” A generation of scholars of modernism – indeed, maybe more than one generation, depending on location – was trained to believe that the movement’s very life and structure lay in its antagonism to the market forces of a mass consumer culture. Modernism, the story went, aimed to escape to a realm of self-sufficient formal autonomy, commerce and trade be damned. But, as many critics have noted, the pushback against that narrow understanding of modernism gave life to what is now called the new modernist studies. The two scenes above, of course, show modernists deeply enmeshed in a fickle, seemingly groundless system of pricing aesthetics. There is more to unpack here conceptually, however, especially if we move beyond the now-familiar fact that modernists were often avid
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self-promoters and marketers. At stake here are the risks, behaviors, anxieties, and cognitive projections that marked the approaches of writers, readers, patrons, sellers, and characters to fundamental questions of futurity and risk. An array of disparate lines of inquiry within the new modernist studies can be brought into alignment by dilating upon the term “speculation.” “Speculation” generally signals a mode of projective thought in which one anticipates, based on ambiguous or inconclusive evidence, what the future will hold – thus, “speculative fiction.” To speculate financially is to gamble in order to both predict and influence the future – often in a personally profitable way, and sometimes through contracts that are themselves called “futures.” The commonality pointed up by “speculation” lies at this intersection of risk and future-creation. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – just to highlight for the moment modernism’s traditional bounds – presented some new instruments of risk, and of speculation specifically, that generated new imaginings of futurity across modernist forms and objects alike. In what is a less immediately visible or self-identified subfield than, say, the work on global modernisms, a body of scholarship has emerged to recast modernism through this risk/futurity dynamic. As this essay will show, such scholarship cuts across studies of affect and the sensorium; of technology, science, and mass violence; of commodity cultures and economic behaviors; of finance and form; and of race and psychological vulnerability. In short, what might have looked like a well-worn antagonism between aesthetics and modern markets actually unfolds onto a diverse but coherent array of topics. By reading risk through speculation (including modernists as speculators), and by concluding with a brief treatment of George Schuyler’s dystopian speculative fiction Black No More (), this essay seeks to illustrate the stakes of speculation in a period marked by radical uncertainty.
Modernism and Risk Society How did the mere fact of being alive in this moment feel like a risk (whether voluntary or involuntary), and how did writers amplify, transform, mitigate, or even exacerbate that risk? The shocking, devastating violence of the early twentieth century long has been identified as a source of modernism’s aesthetics. Aerial bombardment and chemical weapons brought previously unknown terrors to average civilians in metropoles and in colonies, while the grisly injuries and deaths in modern war are integral parts of Woolf’s and Hemingway’s novels. Furthermore, automobile
accidents became regular occurrences (we recall Isadora Duncan’s gruesome fate), while a world running on electricity meant that one could die in a horrifying new manner (as the electric chair would exhibit iconically). The nature of these phenomena is captured succinctly in the theory of “risk society,” which is most closely associated with the sociological work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. “Risk society” theorists seek to understand how risk itself has changed across human history, and especially since the onset of the first Industrial Revolution. There are substantive differences, in other words, between an invasion of a neighboring village and the Chernobyl disaster. Modern “manufactured risks” – the shifting, never fully knowable consequences of technological innovation – came to define life around the world in ways that humanity had never seen, and they provide an optic for thinking about what kinds of risks helped produce and demarcate modernist aesthetics, politics, psychologies, and more. (We recall that many scholars have seen modernism as having ended with the detonation of nuclear weapons.) In a process that Beck calls “reflexive modernity,” modernization in the industrial West becomes both its own theme and a self-perpetuating concept, with an endless and rarely stunted drive toward innovation, speed, and large-scale transformation that promises a better future. Risk, in Giddens’s words, is therefore a way of “organizing future time” in an “attempt to break away from the past and confront an open future” through the “binding of time and space.” But because each new development brings with it potentially disastrous consequences, abuses, and collateral effects, societies devote major resources both to advancing modernization and, consequently, to mitigating or managing the risks and dangers of doing exactly that. The world becomes simultaneously safer and deadlier in reciprocal ways, by way of the same technologies. In a duality that science fiction most famously exploits, the future is always in focus, yet is always potentially terrifying. Beck adds that “wrestl[ing] with the side effects of successful modernization” necessarily means remaining in a state of “anticipation of the catastrophe.” Putting aside the debates about precisely when and where this phase of modernity unfolded, sociologists of this informal school of thought clearly have tapped into a distinction in the elements of daily life that bore on individuals around the globe. And, not surprisingly, the new strategies and objects of political violence that the techno-scientific world produced appear in a host of modernist texts. The tension in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (), for instance, centers on the plans of a group of anarchist spies to carry out a terrorist bombing of the new Greenwich
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Observatory in . Conrad’s narrator notes bleakly on the final page that the nihilistic character the Professor “had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction.” As Conrad intimates, the very future that reflexive modernity promises to create is always under threat. We should remember, though, that it’s not that this moment was more violent than others in history, but that it was differently violent in ways that were made even more visible by new mass media. New literary forms sought to capture this reality, often in hopes of making future life possible, if not altogether utopian, even when apocalypse might seem inevitable. Picking up on this paradox, Sarah Cole and Paul Saint-Amour both understand modern violence as personal and impersonal, dehumanizing and intimate, foreclosing and enabling. And for both critics, literary form is an intervention in the fraught, tenuous conditions of modern existence. Cole’s At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland () addresses the ways in which violence and modernist form were inseparable, as when shellshock became a premise for renovating narrative in Woolf or a blooming corpse becomes a governing motif for Eliot. SaintAmour’s Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (), on the other hand, identifies a “future conditional anxiety” in which time itself becomes “no longer a passive field within which violence unfolds” but rather “a new medium for delivering injury” as the future inevitably arrives. Whether in the “pre-traumatic stress syndrome” that modernists sought to manage by way of encyclopedic form, as Saint-Amour reads it, or in the “the problematic of violence as an organizing cultural and aesthetic fact” that Cole pinpoints, literary innovation became an instrument of risk management. That is to say, form was doing more than rearranging, through collage or myth, the space-time continuum that Einstein had relativized; it was acting as an agent of future-creation, even if that future seemed impossible to create. Such dread has a flip side: modernity’s dangers and newfound risks were often exhilarating, too. As Enda Duffy argues in The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (), the sensory consumption of high velocities – in roller coasters, airplanes, and above all, the cars that factor into everything from Futurism to Fitzgerald’s novels – was “a wholly new experience, the experience of moving at what appeared to be great speeds, and the sensation of controlling that movement”; individuals could feel modernity quite literally. Machine-enabled speed, in other words, was a risk, a shock, and a defamiliarization from which entire worldviews emerged, for “speed is not only a pleasure that has a politics; speed, it
turns out, is politics: the expression of a new order of the organization of global space” (). It thus pressed against the efforts of states to assert control over both velocity and the reconfigured chronotopes it enabled and implied. And Duffy notes that this was not limited to machine technologies: new modes of genre fiction, especially noir detective novels, attempted to speed up the process of reading itself and to make it an addictive pleasure in homologous ways, updating the sensationalist novel’s effects and challenging the slow, heavy formalism of high modernism. If risk society prompted everything from anxieties to elegies to untrammeled excitement, how were its threats and responses to be managed? An indicative feature of risk society lies in the possibility that one person’s actions in a laboratory, a war room, or a financial exchange can affect the lives of millions in an instant – a possibility that, in the past, took more time and more coordinated infrastructure. If the three monographs discussed above focus more on individual experiences of large-scale risk, a symbiotic thread of concerns in the new modernist studies focuses more on collective responses to individual risk. As staggering numbers of people died in industrial accidents and in building projects, or in digging canals in Panama and Egypt, writers asked if perhaps there was more security to be found in rethinking and reconfiguring a given society’s various collectivities. Both the galvanized response of the labor-left to tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in and the successes of the British social welfare movement (seen in the People’s Budget and social insurance programs) illustrated a newfound faith in the power of a risk-mitigation instrument of modern finance: the insurance policy. This financial tool for monetizing the fallout of risk’s catastrophes appears in a variety of modernist works: think of Forster’s insurance clerk Leonard Bast; of Rukeyser’s incorporation of bureaucratic documents from the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster in The Book of the Dead (); of the fixations on mortgage and life insurance payouts by Joyce’s Leopold Bloom; or of the devastating calculation of pensions by Elizabeth Bates, who has just lost her husband in Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” Insurance policies themselves even became plot motives in works like James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (). The promise of insurance as a solution lay in its anticipatory capacities: actuarial science could now estimate and enumerate the likelihood of diverse calamities. Lisi Schoenbach’s Pragmatic Modernism () points to the data revolution in predictive instruments in economic forecasts, meteorological reports, and studies of human behavior, all of which modernist writers repurposed. A declining world of prophecy and
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fortune-telling coexisted with an emergent world of institutions and professions that made consequential decisions driven by data and expertise. In another paradoxical condition, the horrifying threats of modern risk now existed in seemingly inert sets of numbers and figures. In the vein of T. J. Jackson Lears’s studies of chance and luck in American life, Jason Puskar’s Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance () examines the ways in which American writers at the turn of the twentieth century responded with “narratives of spontaneous and blameless violence” that reframed “social and economic interdependence” around the question of insurability. Statistics, quite problematically, both enabled the mitigation of cataclysm and produced a reading of it as purely probabilistic and aleatory – neither human-made nor divine. Meanwhile, the modern welfare state sought to manage the risks of extreme poverty and financial regulators sought to manage systemic monetary risks, all of which were intensified by increasing population density, increasingly scarce resources, and an increasing reliance on technology in everyday life. Focusing on legislation such as the Social Security Act of , Michael Szalay’s New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State () looks to Wallace Stevens, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and others to argue that modernist writers found “in the specifically compensatory mechanisms of risk management not only the modern state’s response to a crisis in its social legitimacy, but the framework for a response to a similar crisis facing modern literature” – namely, the need for literature to engage audiences with political and economic content. Susan Edmunds’s Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State () returns to the veterans’ and mothers’ pension programs and the progressive reform campaigns that preceded the New Deal and notes their reinstallation of the middle-class, white, heteronormative domestic scene as the central entity to shore up against the threats of modernity. Risk mitigation, in this case, reverts society back to traditionalist notions of race, family, and masculinity that undergird policies as instruments of imagined future security.
Finance, Futurity, and Modernist Speculators The future was reshaped and endangered by much more than physical violence in this moment. New laws governing obscenity and sexuality imperiled millions who transgressed them, while new pandemics and addictive substances swept across populations in sprawling urban centers and amid mass migrations. The stock ticker (invented ) and new
instruments of finance and trade brought increased volatility through serial panics and collapses, leaving any given society’s most vulnerable in unending uncertainty. And that same rapidly changing world of finance that provided the framework for personal and social insurance also made possible radical shifts in wealth and social standing that disrupted familiar categories of class. Financial speculation in particular boomed, especially in American markets, from the Gilded Age through to ; the speculator became a defining figure of Gilded Age literature. This speculation ranged from railway stocks to cattle, and as millions of common Americans began to buy equities, they enmeshed themselves in a world of future-shaping that finance enabled. The economic theorist William Stanley Jevons argued that “anticipated feeling” was a formative part of present actions in economic decision-making, and understood that, behaviorally, the “intensity of present anticipated feeling must . . . be some function of the future actual feeling and of the intervening time, and it must increase as we approach the moment of realisation,” thereby pressurizing our efforts to “take account of the uncertainty of all future events.” For these reasons and more, in , future president Woodrow Wilson embraced this exciting vulnerability and unpredictability, writing that “we live for our own age – an age like Shakespeare’s, when an old world is passing away, a new world coming in – an age of speculation and every new adventure of the mind; a full stage, an intricate plot, a universal play of passion, an outcome no man can foresee.” A Marxist tradition of thinking about modern financial instruments and their apparent power to render material goods and human labor abstract has guided a number of critics to understand how speculation, especially in the dual sense Wilson employs above, bore upon literary form. Commodities, for instance, were (and remain) at once everyday consumable goods – corn, oil, cotton – and speculative objects for financiers who will never consume, touch, or use them, needing them instead for their conceptual functions. In an instance of what Marx called the “double form” of the commodity, wheat – a staple grain for millennia – was by the late s also a wildly fluctuating commodity: as Jonathan Levy notes, “in , American farmers harvested million bushels of wheat . . . [while] some , trillion bushels of wheat sold in futures contracts in the United States . . . were set off, never delivered.” Thus, as Frank Norris’s novels showed, farming was now subject both to the weather patterns and mismanagement that had always affected it and to the vicissitudes of risky, immaterial bets and trades made far away by unknown persons. As Urs Stäheli theorizes it, stock speculation “converts its economic referents into
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a play of self-generated signs, abstracted from the ‘real’ values previously considered to underwrite the substance of economic operations,” and in this era, “the stock exchange constituted the economic imaginary through a process of rigorous self-referential abstraction.” Several legal and moral arguments against financial speculation in this moment were grounded in exactly these questions of materiality and ontology, which are familiar to scholars of modernism: “investments” delivered tangible goods and assets, whereas “speculation” traded only ideas and in a world of imagination nearly untethered from reality, destroying the intrinsic value of goods humans need. Fredric Jameson’s influence on approaches to finance and economics in modernist studies is difficult to overstate and needs no full recapitulation here. For Jameson, modernism emerged as a response to, and cognitive category created to grapple with, modernization in the late nineteenthcentury West. Here, modes of aesthetic abstraction “faithfully – even ‘realistically’ – reproduced and represented the increasing abstraction and deterritorialization of Lenin’s ‘imperialist stage’.” Here, “capital itself becomes free-floating” and “money becomes in a second sense and to a second degree abstract” (). Modernism thereby looks like a literature of speculation, not of investment; the commitments to materiality and external reference in late realism are discarded in favor of increasing conceptual abstraction. We might think here of the areferential lines and shapes of a Wassily Kandinsky painting or the opaque, anti-realistic neologisms of César Vallejo’s Trilce (). Of course, such abstraction and meta-abstraction, focused intensely on form, is only one version of modernism, but it spawned a great deal of scholarly work that treats what we might call the “economic foundations” of modernism. In a sequence of monographs, Walter Benn Michaels offered a largely New Historicist charting of this developmental shift. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism () and Our America (), he ties questions of finance and economics in naturalist and modernist works to the ontological status of linguistic and social signs. The modernist “insistence that the word become the thing” indicates, for Michaels, an embrace of the signifier as a material reality that does not need the external realities of referents; the debates in the Free Silver movement and in Saussurean linguistics thus were cognate. Michael Tratner makes a similar suggestion of continuity in Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature () when he pairs Ulysses and Dreiser’s The Financier as novels trying to solve the same questions of value, but through very different formal means and with
opposed aesthetic aims. More recently, scholars such as Christopher Kempf have argued that financial speculation is integral to the narrative logic of landmark texts like Ulysses. Joyce advances the shift in “the locus of economic value from object to representation, from signified to signifier,” Kempf writes, so that the world of objects that seems so vital to the novel’s materialist commitments loses its ties to the world of linguistic reference; narrative itself is reduced to a flow of nonlinguistic pricing data in one pivotal scene. Erica Beckman traces even broader waves of literary responses to financial modernization during Latin America’s Export Age (–), while Sarah L. Lincoln reads an analogous effect in Ben Okri’s “petro-magic realism” in light of Nigeria’s “speculative mania” during its oil boom in the s. In the latter case, “inflation in one sphere – monetized modern life – finds symptomatic expression in a second-order inflation, in the sphere of literary modernism.” Nicky Marsh has pointed to a complementary but inverse strand of modernist writing: she argues that Mansfield, Woolf, and J. M. Keynes “used money as a profoundly ironic form of resistance, rejecting its endless fungibility as an object of pure exchange,” and instead seeing “embedded and potentially resistant social meanings” located in the materiality of specie itself. But abstraction, as a financial and an aesthetic effect, is only one element of speculation. Speculation, like gambling, involves material practices with varied social, physiological, and emotional effects: it brings out the classic tension between the supposedly impersonal, unemotional process of formalist abstraction and the visceral, physiological sensations that accompany it. Far from the disembodied, rational investor at the center of neoclassical economics, speculators are supposedly irrational, impulsive, and all too corporeal. Monnier herself wrote, “Shall I risk this comparison? – Speculation is like somebody who swallows down big mouthfuls without chewing, and who vomits almost immediately” (). It is at once a cerebral, cognitive process and a bodily thrill, a leap of faith into the unknown of the future. Speculation also invokes trust (and often deceit); it is an epistemology, a claim of access to intuitive or projective knowledge that others don’t have, but that justifies the risk at hand; and in this moment, it was available to common people – including a swelling class of newly literate citizens, and women and minorities who were previously excluded – in ways previously reserved for titans and magnates, thereby remaking again the categories of class and social position. As Stäheli’s Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, the Economy, and Popular Discourse () documents, speculation thrived as a new form of cheap entertainment in the late s – as an intoxicating exhilaration that was
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widely condemned just as bucket shops were made illicit. The Scottish author Charles Mackay’s hugely influential and often-reprinted Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds () ingrained the figure of the fraudulent and deceitful speculator-prognosticator by devoting a chapter to speculative bubbles alongside other chapters on witch hunts, fortune telling, alchemy, and the Crusades. Speculation became indelibly associated with “manias,” “frenzies,” “mass hysteria,” and other such modes of collective irrationality – even with venereal disease and opium use. As Laura Meixner shows, “the social pathologies of female speculation” in particular were “medicalized,” with theories abounding that speculation caused women to age prematurely, develop “nervous ailments,” and fall into states of hysterical delusion vaguely termed “speculitis.” Speculation threatened individuals, social bodies, and the relationships between them: the process of financial abstraction was suddenly an actual drug, and the future was being created by addicted, uneducated, and untrustworthy types. And yet, at this same moment, if speculative behaviors pressed on boundaries of received understandings of individual agency and irrational groupthink, a Supreme Court ruling also partially and controversially naturalized speculation – not only as a legitimate economic instrument, but also as an organic, human practice. Amid fervent debates about speculation’s legality and regulation, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a landmark ruling on grain speculation in that people will endeavor to forecast the future, and to make agreements according to their prophecy. Speculation of this kind by competent men is the self-adjustment of society to the probable. Its value is well known as a means of avoiding or mitigating catastrophes, equalizing prices, and providing for periods of want. It is true that the success of the strong induces imitation by the weak, and that incompetent persons bring themselves to ruin by undertaking to speculate in their turn.
The key words here are “competent men”: speculation was a social good when practiced by well-studied, rational, strong male actors who had access to information (revenue statements, probability tables, national economic data) and who had training that would allow them to assess and forecast the future accurately for everyone else. Speculation was a necessary, rational instrument of political economy and a crucial development in modern scientific practices. And its proponents argued – extending Holmes’s logic – that speculation was the most efficient and natural way to offset the downsides of manufactured risk that incompetent, weak, ill-trained humans take.
Late nineteenth-century naturalist literature from around the world, and especially Gilded Age and Progressive Era literature in the United States, explored this paradox of the vindication and denigration of speculation through countless plots centered on gambles, swindles, frauds, precipitous financial risks, and more. Modernists – perhaps despite themselves – continued this vein of social inquiry among their predecessors rather than rejecting it: consider the speculative plots in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (), Conrad’s Chance (), Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (), and Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury (). Perhaps best known is Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (), which revolves around modes of wealth production. Tom Buchanan has inherited money and Nick Carraway works as a respectable bond trader in a legitimate sector of finance, while Jay Gatsby amasses his fortune by speculating in high-risk illegal activities (bootlegging with a known gambler as his partner) that deliver cheap thrills. Buchanan thus views Daisy as an investment that insures his social stability via marriage, whereas Gatsby views her as a speculative commodity, noting that even “her voice is full of money” and realizing that “it excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy – it increased her value in his eyes.” Moreover, aesthetic movements as such in this time became new kinds of speculative objects. As Meixner recounts, impressionist paintings, for instance, arrived in the United States precisely at the moment in of a raging debate on whether and how to tax aesthetic objects. (The United States had slapped percent tariffs on imported art in retaliation for a ban in France on US pork.) French painters saw Gilded Age collectors as what we would now call “angel investors” and convinced them to gamble on culture and prestige, thereby making art a speculative good in new ways. Impressionism thus arrived as a speculative commodity that commented on its own speculation; Jesse Matz’s Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture () shows that this process has continued into the art markets of the present. Modernists may have mastered the art of speculative abstraction on a formal level, but as speculators themselves, they often suffered ruin in the manner of predecessors such as Swift and Twain. Hannah Freed-Thall has demonstrated that Proust not only “squander[ed] about a third of his fortune on stocks,” many of them high-risk foreign trades, but also used “gambling, play, and irrational expenditure” to figure queerness in À la recherche du temps perdu (–) – whose publication he also selffinanced after many rejections. His “particular predilection for
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unforeseen leaps and crashes of value” and for plotting insider tips and intimate knowledge, Freed-Thall contends, figures “speculation and writing practices as two sides of the same coin.” Proust was hardly alone in such efforts: Zora Neale Hurston was, in Glenn Willmott’s characterization, a speculator in cultural objects, since her funding contract with Charlotte Osgood Mason governed her folkloric research in the South. Other patrons, from Harriet Shaw Weaver to Carl Van Vechten, took risks on writers and texts that went beyond the normative understandings of sound, rational investment. Furthermore, because women and minorities were variously barred and discouraged from joining the new classes of Wall Street investors at the turn of the century, the arts and culture provided a privileged alternative set of speculative opportunities for them. Arguably the most successful of all modernist speculators was Gertrude Stein, whose risky art purchases helped set in motion the aesthetic trends and movements that flourished in the early twentieth century. In a vein of work indebted to Bourdieu, scholars of the new modernist studies have seen that modernists cultivated an aura around their works that required buyers to understand them as prestigious and valuable by way of their exclusivity; exclusivity, all the while, was more a market-niche in a saturated field than an escape from market forces. Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture () documents in detail how modernists invited the commodification of their works – not through common consumption, but through “a different economic circuit of patronage, collecting, speculation, and investment.” Indeed, the young James Joyce – who soon failed in his venture to found an early movie theater in Dublin – even attempted to “turn himself into a joint-stock company and sell shares, which would increase spectacularly in value as his books began to appear,” as Richard Ellmann wrote. The age-old practice of collecting became not only a means of archiving and curating modernism in its incipient moments but also a form of speculating, as Jeremy Braddock’s Collecting as Modernist Practice () argues. Modernists, that is to say, circulated the idea that they were collectors, and that their works were collectible, because they were at the cutting edge of forging an influential aesthetic future: they were, in fact, making the future with art, as Langston Hughes often contended. As Carey James Mickalites writes, Conrad’s Chance – the author’s first commercial success – dramatizes this process, for it is at once a “satire on speculators” and a “form of literary speculation on the future of modernism.”
Speculative Fiction and the Risks of Race: George Schuyler’s Black No More () I conclude by turning to George Schuyler’s Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. – (). An important figure in American cultural life in the s and s, Schuyler – once dubbed “the black Mencken” – largely fell out of critical view after he turned fully from leftism to conspiratorial anti-communism, the latter of which included vicious attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. But his work is now receiving new attention because of its curious position in the histories of several fields and genres. As in the works of Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, and a number of others, the distance between financial speculation and the generic conventions of speculative fiction in Schuyler’s novel is minimal. Its satirical, often grotesque plot imagines a near-future America in the mid-s in which African Americans can undergo a medical procedure, Black-No-More, that transforms their appearance to make them look white. But racial transformation in the novel is not only a speculative matter – that is, a possibility premised on magical science. It is also a speculative enterprise. The book turns out to focus very little on science and more on the economy and sources of legal, illegal, and semi-legal finance; in fact, Schuyler barely describes the process of this manufactured risk of changing races. We must ask how and why Schuyler appears to subordinate what seems the headline of his plot to the structures of financial speculation, and why this extreme gamble of Black-No-More is so intimately bound up with its monetization. Schuyler spends long paragraphs detailing the financial and labor histories of his protagonists and explaining the economics of the Black-NoMore business. As it turns out, almost all of the principal players in the novel previously worked in social sectors where speculation and financial risk were central, from banks to back-alley gambling – but they were not profiting well because of their skin color. Dr. Junius Crookman, who develops and performs the Black-No-More procedure, is both the con man implied by his surname and an ambitious speculator. He partners with Hank Johnson, who notes to Crookman: “We’re settin’ on th’ world, ain’t we? Our racket’s within th’ law, ain’t it? We’re makin’ money faster’n we can take it in, ain’t we? Whut could happen? This here is the best and safest graft I’ve ever been in.” Johnson, we learn, was imprisoned ten years ago, having been sentenced “for participating in a little crap game.”
Risk’s Instruments
He has since been a drifter, dice-player, runner in the “Numbers racket,” illicit “banker,” briber, and bail bondsman (BNM ). Crookman presents to him and to the other investors very detailed but seemingly inflated financial reports. Meanwhile, he voraciously buys up real estate and expands to more than facilities for Black-No-More in a short time – and from there, he wants to begin working in hospitals to transform black babies upon birth. By the latter part of the novel, Black-No-More is funding a presidential campaign with $ million in contributions, and Crookman becomes Surgeon General. The premise of the novel, then, is not simply that in the near future, blackness can be technologically and controversially transformed into whiteness; rather, it is that “whiteness could be mechanized, packaged, and sold by black men,” as Sonnet H. Retman writes. Passing along a causal chain, the procedure turns black men into speculators (and thus, double-frauds) themselves. Thus we see that the main character Max Disher (who changes his name to Matthew Fisher after the procedure) pays $ to become white, then immediately sells the story of his transformation to a magazine for $,, or roughly $, in today’s money. Having profited twentyfold in just minutes, Max then flips this profit in order to finance his close friend Bunny Brown’s racial transformation. In other words, Max’s initial purchase of a highly speculative procedure (he was among the first subjects) pays off wildly and, in turn, buys the procedure for other black men. In the background, we learn that “Max was one of the Aframerican Fire Insurance Company’s crack agents, Bunny was a teller in the Douglass Bank” – veterans of the entwined fields of speculation and risk management (BNM ). As the novel continues, black-owned banks falter, philanthropy for black uplift decreases, and, most tellingly, even “gambling” and “the usual sources of graft vanished” because of this speculative substitute (BNM ). The white economy in the South suffers, too, because “there were no longer any Negroes to jim crow” (BNM ). Hardly a detail in the novel is not tied to some form of financial risk: Dr. Buggerie, a researcher who figures importantly in the latter part of the novel, has written a study called “The Incidence of Psittacosis among the Hiphopa Indians of the Amazon Valley and Its Relation to Life Insurance Rates in the United States” (BNM ). Speculation becomes a contagious virus in the novel, and Schuyler himself speculates on what a radically different future would look like under such a transfer of financial instruments and economic autonomy to black subjects masquerading as white. Fisher’s newfound speculative disposition leads him to con the white supremacist Knights of Nordica group
(a satire of the KKK) out of tens of thousands of dollars and, at the harrowing extreme of this trend, to consider murdering his infant son because he is part black. Only “a devil of ambition whisper[ing] seductively about wealth, power and prestige” stops him, as he hopes to profit even further from his child (BNM ). To keep following this logic, being born (or, reborn) white is to be a commodity upon which one can self-speculate with both great risk and great security. The novel’s scientific futurism is premised on the facts that we don’t fully know what race is – despite the protracted work in genealogy and pseudoscience that consumes the second half of the novel – and that we have little reliable evidence or data on the future shape of race relations. If we posit that Schuyler saw this novel as an intervention in shaping future economic life for African Americans in the s, we must step back from the novel’s diegetic world to take in its effects more fully. Though Schuyler himself was not the speculator that Proust was, Black No More posed some pointed risks in its circulation: it risked censorship because of a horrifying scene in which characters have their genitals cut off and sewn onto their backs just before they are executed and burned, and it risked censure and condemnation because it lampooned Du Bois in his prime with a splenetic caricature. And while it was not marketed as a prized speculative commodity, it was priced at $., or $ in today’s dollars, well above the dime novel and a notch above many fictions. (Its publisher, the Macaulay Company, mostly trafficked in cheap romance and celebrity, crime, and exotic adventure – Edgar Rice Burroughs, of Tarzan fame, was the firm’s staple author.) But Schuyler himself rolled out an allied plan for Black No More’s cultural life. In December , just a month before the novel appeared, Schuyler founded and presided over the Young Negroes’ Co-Operative League. The group represented his alternative to boycotts of white businesses and to various uplift plans: it was a fund designed to shift black consumer habits and organize them into influential, self-sufficient societies of philanthropy and business, including chain stores. Central to this project was a belief that irrational speculation had led to the crash, and furthermore, that the still-new Depression had disproportionately harmed minorities and women. Its aim was to mitigate the kinds of economic risk-taking that drove black Americans into poverty and desperation – and into the kinds of fantasies of racial transformation that the novel captures. It was, in other words, an economic program meant to stem the tide of more high-risk and ruinous speculation that the novel dramatizes.
Risk’s Instruments
Not coincidentally, in Schuyler opened one of his regular newspaper columns with the claim that book buying was a central form of consumption that could counteract the devastation of the Depression. In this, he appears as one of many modernists who believed that the markets for aesthetic objects – whether speculative or retail consumer markets – could reshape broader economic worlds, present and future. Anyone who has spent time reading the letters of modernist writers knows how much of their time was devoted to the apparent drudgery of selling their skills and their works, all while hoping to break with the late Victorian model of the writer professionalized by commercial markets. In the background of such efforts were the successes of mass literacy campaigns and compulsory public education in urban centers, rural regions, and colonies alike, all of which created new classes and types of readers eager to consume and – perhaps more important – to be educated on how and why to consume literature. But texts could put readers in actual peril; in , Yeats looked back at the Easter Rising of and asked with grave concern, “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” As Schuyler’s novel and his economic organizing both indicate, speculation held out promise to historically marginalized and oppressed groups, but also made life exponentially more dangerous for them. We also know that, across history, disenfranchised groups took some of the most daring risks – coming out of the closet, fleeing slavery and violence, prostituting themselves – in which the “competent,” masculinist interpretation of financial data so vital to Holmes played little to no role. The projection of futurity more generally has a different history in minority cultures than in those with less restricted access to financial speculation. The Afropessimist field of Black philosophy, for instance, has questioned how Black peoples are supposed to imagine futures of unlimited potentiality when both the past and the present portend continued threats to their existence. Elsewhere, a strand of queer theory captured in Lee Edelman’s pointedly titled No Future () has criticized an over-reliance on models of heteronormative familial reproduction as the basis for conceiving of future scenarios. Looking across these fields, we can see a current interest in the predictive powers and shortcomings of Big Data, the deeper explorations of minority vulnerabilities over time, and the fear of both epidemic violence and what Rob Nixon has called the “slow violence” of environmental devastation and climate change. To say that such topics will continue to bear on modernist studies with increasing intensity in the coming years seems hardly a speculative risk.
Notes Unsigned editorial, “Modernism and Politics Play Havoc with Art,” Part II, The Art World . (December ), –. Adrienne Monnier, The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, ed. and tr. Richard McDougall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, ), ; emphasis in original. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text. Ulrich Beck, World at Risk, tr. Cirian Cronin (Malden, MA: Polity, ), . As critics have noted, Beck’s early formulations of “risk society” did not adequately distinguish “risk” from “hazard” or “peril,” but that discussion requires more space to treat. Ibid., . Anthony Giddens, quoted in Giddens and Christopher Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), , . Ibid., , . Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. Tanya Agathocleous (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, ), . Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Ibid., –, emphasis in original; Sarah Cole, At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Jason Puskar, Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), . Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Szalay’s work joins a longer conversation in modernist studies on collectivity and risk that includes works by Barbara Foley, Carey Nelson, Alan Filreis, Benjamin Kohlmann, and others. William Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, nd ed. (London: Macmillan, ), , ; emphasis in original. Woodrow Wilson, “On Being Human,” The Atlantic (September ), . Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), . The growing body of work in ecocritical approaches to modernism extends these interests in directions I do not have the space to follow here. Urs Stäheli, Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, the Economy, and Popular Discourse, tr. Eric Savoth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), , . Accounts of Jameson’s readings of modernism, and of the engagements with modernism within the Marxist traditions that he draws upon, are plentiful. As
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a starting point, see Adam Roberts, Fredric Jameson (New York: Routledge, ). The “new economic criticism” associated with Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen has not had as much discussion in modernist studies as it has in analyses of previous eras and movements. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, – (London: Verso, ), . Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), ; Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). Christopher Kempf, “‘Addicted a Little to the Lubric’: Spectacle, Speculation, and the Language of Flow in Ulysses,” Modernism/modernity . (January ), . Sarah L. Lincoln, “‘Petro-Magic Realism’: Ben Okri’s Inflationary Modernism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . See also Erica Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); and Joshua Schuster’s reading of the “commodity poem” and oil culture in modernism in The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ), –. Marsh, “The Cosmopolitan Coin: What Modernists Make of Money,” Modernism/modernity . (September ), . Meixner, “‘Gambling with Bread’: Money, Speculation, and the Marketplace,” Modernism/modernity . (January ), . Holmes, Board of Trade v. Christie Grain & Stock Co., U.S. (), §. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, ),. See Meixner, “Gambling with Bread,” . Freed-Thall, “Speculative Modernism: Proust and the Stock Market,” Modernist Cultures . (), . Ibid., . Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), . Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), . Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, ), . Mickalites, Modernism and Market Fantasy: British Fictions of Capital, – (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . Jennifer Wicke quite provocatively asked in if the field of modernist studies itself was a speculative bubble in her “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble,” Modernism/modernity . (September ), –. James O. Young, Black Writers of the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ), .
The return to Schuyler’s works owes much to Mark Christian Thompson; the growing bibliography of treatments of Black No More alone now includes studies by Sonnet H. Retman, Hee-Jung Serenity Joo, Sara Marzioli, Dana Carluccio, Yogita Goyal, and others. Schuyler, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. – (Boston: Northeastern University Press, ), ; hereafter cited parenthetically in text as BNM. Retman, “Black No More: George Schuyler and Racial Capitalism,” PMLA . (October ), . Yeats, “Man and the Echo,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, ), . Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).
Deep Time’s Hauntings Modernism and Alternative Chronology Paul K. Saint-Amour
She was haunted by absurd jumbled ideas – how, if one went far enough back, everything was perhaps intelligible; everything was in common; for the mammoths who pastured in the fields of Richmond High Street had turned into paving stones and boxes full of ribbon, and her aunts.
—Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out ()
Virginia Woolf is at her comic best in this sentence from her first novel. She has, to begin with, sprung mammoths on us in the middle of a shipboard conversation between Rachel Vinrace and her fellow passenger, Richard Dalloway. These mammoths aren’t fossil remains on display in the Natural History Museum but living creatures Rachel imagines grazing where the genteel borough of Richmond now stands. What’s absurd and jumbled here isn’t just the pairing of Pleistocene-era megafauna with a posh London neighborhood. It’s also the material continuity between the two – the persistence of bits of mammoth in paving stone, ribbon box, and aunts. With all this incongruity blooming, it’s small wonder if the reader forgets that the sentence began in a condition of haunting. But the punchline word aunts also echoes the early word haunted, giving an overall circuit and pattern to a sentence that feels jumbled at the scale of phrase and clause. After all, the notion that scaling up can turn absurdity intelligible is Rachel’s main intuition here. It’s only when one goes far enough back in time to trace their shared debt to the Richmond mammoths that things as ill-matched as paving stones and ribbon boxes are uncovered in their commonality. This chronologically deep commonality among disparate things – not their incongruity – is what haunts Rachel. Yet far from being at odds with comedy, the haunting in question embraces and even requires it, producing intelligibility as it does through ludicrous shifts of scale. In the midst of deep time’s haunting are one’s aunts.
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Deep time: in English, the expression seems to have been coined in by John McPhee in Basin and Range to refer to the kinds of geological time scales that human minds have been able to detect and measure since the late eighteenth century but still struggle to comprehend. These epochal time scales – geological but also astronomical and cosmological – make for strange bedfellows with modernism. Deep time dwarfs all human aesthetic modes and movements, but especially those arrayed around the new, the now, the moment. If you compress the earth’s . billion years into a twelve-month calendar, the Cretaceous–Paleogene event that extinguished the dinosaurs along with three-fourths of the planet’s plant and animal species happens on December . Homo sapiens arrives at : p.m. on December and human agriculture at one minute to midnight. Modernity itself, typically understood to have emerged in the eighteenth century, occupies less than the last two seconds of the year, and a conventionally periodized modernism the last one second. Expanding our notions of modernity and consequently of modernism to encompass, say, the Mongol Empire or Tang Dynasty China gains us at most a few seconds. Even a protracted modernism is hardly a flash in the great pan of terrestrial deep time. It’s true that human activity has begun to leave detectable traces on the Earth’s geological record. But whether the geologists of the future peg the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch to the rise of agriculture, the start of the Industrial Revolution, or the advent of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, modernism has no signature type of sediment, fossil, or radioisotope that will allow it to be sifted from the rest of its epoch’s stratigraphic record. If deep time could see, modernism wouldn’t rise to the level of the visible. Yet deep time is clearly on literary modernism’s mind, as evidenced by its presence in a wide range of modernist texts, including some of the most canonical. When in the penultimate episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses () Leopold Bloom heats water to make hot cocoa for his guest Stephen Dedalus, he lights “polyhedral masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn derived their vegetative existence from the sun.” Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins have identified a notion of deep time operating in the critical writings of T. S. Eliot and Van Wyck Brooks, with their long transtemporal models of tradition. E. M. Forster, whose A Passage to India () confers a kind of geological agency on the ancient Marabar Caves, also wrote a short story, “The Machine Stops” (), set thousands of years in the future in underground complexes where humans lead hi-tech, radically mediated lives far from the planet’s toxic surface.
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The ease with which, today, we could extend this list is in turn a function of modernist studies’ deepening engagement with ecocriticism and with the environmental humanities more broadly. Recent book-length studies in the field have taken up the relationship between American avant-garde aesthetics and environmental consciousness, British modernists’ anticipations of present-day ecomaterialist thought, the impact of eco-catastrophe on modernist cultural production, and the prospect that modernist poetry might serve as a resource for a new poetics of climate change in the present. In , a special “Modernist Inhumanisms” issue of Modernism/modernity offered several attempts to cross-pollinate modernism and science fiction on the basis of their shared interest in the intimate entanglement of human and non-human entities and in extreme scalar shifts – often temporal ones that bridge the punctuality of the moment with the vaster frames of the epoch, past and future. Virginia Woolf has been an important figure for these developments in modernist studies, not least for her interest in non-human entities and time frames. Over the past two decades, scholars have written on her engagement with stellar and planetary temporalities, her use of glaciers to rescale contemporary trauma, and the role of granite in her materialist aesthetics. But when it comes to Woolf and deep time, the passage with which I opened is typical in dealing less with geological time than with a deep but still human time – with prehistoric and premodern human communities, the flora and megafauna with which they shared the world, and the material traces left by all of these in the present. And if her novels contain a mascot for this proximate deep time, it’s the extinct Mammuthus primigenius that her readers first encounter in The Voyage Out. In Mrs. Dalloway (), the old woman opposite the Regent’s Park tube station is said to have been singing of love there “through the age of tusk and mammoth.” Mr. Ramsay, in the final section of To the Lighthouse (), has been reading in the newspaper about a mammoth dug up in a London street. And as Between the Acts () opens, Lucy Swithin is reading in H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History about a time when “[t]here were rhododendrons in the Strand; and mammoths in Piccadilly.” In all four of these major works, the mammoth strolls briefly but disruptively onto the stage of the present, asserting the material persistence and thus the legibility of a deep English past amid the flux of the twentieth century. Mammoth hunting in Woolf has its satisfactions, but I have a different quarry in mind. Having touched on two disparate scales of modernist temporality – the momentary and the epochal – I want to show how the two are in fact fused to each other in the literature and scopic regimes of
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the early twentieth century. To begin with, deep time is always “there” to be seen, but the opening through which we see it is shaped by the technologies, motives, and preoccupations of a given moment. In the present, our interest in deep time is framed by anthropogenic climate change, whose effects are rewriting the deep future of the planet and prompting us to reflect, in turn, on the deep past through which life on Earth emerged and evolved in tandem with its enabling conditions. In the early decades of the last century, contrastingly, deep time was more often figured as a backdrop or counterpoint to punctual human actions and experiences than as a scale at which their ramifications might be measured. But alongside this contrapuntal role, I will argue, we find in modernism a recognition that the epochal is perceptually a function of the momentary. According to this meta-discourse about temporal scales, the now, in all its partiality and site-specificity, is necessarily the aperture through which deep time can be glimpsed. And that glimpse in turn loads the moment with particular pressures and openings, including an opening toward the deep future. Taking my cue from this meta-discourse, I provide a situated glimpse, rather than a high-altitude survey, of how deep time haunts modernism. Accordingly, this chapter annotates a few moments in the work of a particular writer, Woolf, alongside a particular photographic regime for seeing, from a highly contingent if elevated vantage, back into the deep human past. As Woolf’s Between the Acts opens on an evening in June , Bart Oliver, a retired member of the Indian Civil Service and the master of the country house where the novel is set, says from his armchair that the site they had chosen for the cesspool was, if he had heard aright, on the Roman road. From an aeroplane, he said, you could still see, plainly marked, the scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; by the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars. (–)
Bart’s comment, quickly left behind by the flow of conversation, nonetheless sets up one of the novel’s major themes and techniques: the legibility of the past in the landscape of the present. More, it refers to a way of seeing the remote past that had become both possible and celebrated during the interwar years that are coming to a close as the actions of the novel unfold. Bart’s stockbroker son Giles sees Europe in June as “bristling with guns, poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly” (). But as Bart notes, during the twenties and
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thirties the aeroplane had been used as a viewing platform from which to see through the furrows and downs of the present to the roads, foundations, and plow marks of much earlier human communities. And airborne cameras had not only assisted archaeologists in this new way of studying the past but also brought compelling aerial images of premodern sites to readers like Bart Oliver, whose amateur interest in archaeology is reflected in the contents of Pointz Hall’s library. In March , two months before the publication of To the Lighthouse, the first issue of the archaeology journal Antiquity appeared. Notwithstanding its title, the journal was aimed clearly at the newfangled and the contemporary, appealing to a broad readership in its style and choice of subject and in foregrounding technical advances in archaeological practice. Foremost among these was the use of aerial photography for identifying, mapping, and analyzing prehistoric sites. The journal’s founding editor, O. G. S. Crawford (Figure .), had worked in reconnaissance for the Royal Flying Corps during World War I and had returned to England convinced that aerial photography should be applied to his civilian field of
Figure . O. G. S. Crawford at Stonehenge in . Image courtesy of the O. G. S. Crawford Photographic Archive, Institute of Archaeology, Oxford.
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study. That conviction had grown during his early postwar years in the Ordnance Survey’s Archaeology Office, which received any RAF air photographs containing archaeologically significant information. And it had borne its first fruit in when Crawford, using RAF photos to guide his excavations, had been able to locate and confirm the lost course of a branch of Stonehenge Avenue, capturing the public imagination by publishing news articles with big photo spreads in the Observer and the Illustrated London News (Figure .). With the launch of Antiquity, the flourishing subfield of aerial archaeology now had its home organ, which was widely read and reviewed from its inaugural issue. The first classic work of aerial archaeology soon followed. This was Crawford’s Wessex from the Air (), which he co-wrote with Alexander Keiller and named after the landscape of Thomas Hardy’s novels, a locality replete with prehistory. One might expect the traces of prehistoric agriculture and settlements, having persisted in a landscape for millennia, to be legible under any conditions. But a trace may endure without being perennially or easily visible. In Crawford’s pamphlet, “Air-Photography for Archaeologists,” his first attempt at a methodological treatise for aerial archaeology, the narrowness of the conditions that reveal the remote past from above is a major theme. Because ancient remains such as banks, mounds, foundations, hollows, ditches, and pits are best seen from the air by the shadows they cast – as “shadow-sites,” in Crawford’s nomenclature – the optimal time to photograph them is when the sun is low. “The bank or ditch must lie at right-angles to the direction of the rays of the sun; otherwise it will probably be invisible. Consequently it is important to choose not just any time when the sun is low, but the particular time when its rays fall in the right direction.” Sloping terrain had to be photographed while the sun shone down the slope from behind the site. “Soil marks” caused by ancient ditches dug in chalky soil were only visible when light rain had darkened the disturbed ground more than the surrounding area. And the visibility of “crop-sites” – buried foundations or ditches revealed by differentials in the color, height, or type of plant growing over the disturbed area – was contingent on rainfall, temperature, and the stage of crop growth as well as on the diurnal and seasonal light conditions. Figure ., a photograph of Badbury featured in “Air-Photography for Archaeologists,” shows the traces of a Roman road crossing diagonally from the top right-hand corner through a plowed field planted with corn (above and to the right of the dark hedge line) and continuing through open down (below and to the left of the hedge line). At : a.m. on April , , when the photo was taken, the lower part of the road could be seen by a person on the ground.
Figure . “New Discoveries at Stonehenge Made from the Air: Photographs at , Feet Revealing a Lost Avenue,” Illustrated London News, August , .
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Figure . Aerial photograph of Badbury taken at : a.m. on April , , showing a Roman road crossing diagonally from top right. Note the annotation of “Turf” vs. “Corn.” O. G. S. Crawford, “Air-Photography for Archaeologists,” Ordnance Survey Professional Papers, new ser., (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, ).
Deep Time’s Hauntings
The portion in the cultivated field, however, was invisible from the ground but visible from the air thanks to variations in the corn’s height and coloring and to the seasonal timing of the photograph. An ancient site lost to view in whole or part could become legible through such whiskerthin openings in time. To see these effaced elements of the deep past one had to look at precisely the right moment. And to be looking with the help of the right technology. The images taken by Crawford’s collaborators in the s stood at the intersection of two cutting-edge technologies that had undergone rapid development, both independently and in tandem, during World War I. As a military technological assemblage, aerial photography had given rise to industrialscale facilities for processing photographic coverage of the front as well as to the discipline of reconnaissance photo interpretation. It had seen advances in lens quality, platform stability, and camera automation. And it had informed tactical decisions by tracking changes in troop and weapons emplacements and guiding artillery fire on a day-to-day, even hour-to-hour basis. After the war, those who took the photos that appeared in Antiquity and in Crawford’s books were typically RAF or Royal Navy Air Force pilots whose aerial survey work helped build the case for the necessity of maintaining the air services during peacetime. They continued to push the photographic technology, using captured German cameras and lenses acquired from the War Office’s Disposal Board or constructing, as Major George W. Allen did, their own cameras for oblique aerial shots. The photographs they took of barrows and henges, Bronze Age ditches, and Iron Age hill-forts were thanks to high-precision machines honed during what was at the time the most obsessively chronometrical war in human history. During the hot, dry summer of , an RAF plane flying at an altitude of , feet over a field of ripening barley near Caistor St. Edmund in Norfolk captured what Crawford described as “probably the most remarkable air-photograph yet taken.” It revealed in stunning detail the layout of Venta Icenorum, a Roman town that had been built in the early second century and whose exact whereabouts had been unknown for centuries (see Figures . and .). The parched barley crop, growing in shallow, stony soil and ripening faster and lighter where it grew atop hard foundations, made visible the causeways of roads, the locations of houses and marketplaces, even the outlines of the town’s twin temples. When the Times published the photograph in a spectacular half-page spread the following year, it caused a sensation; readers subscribed by mail to help fund the excavations of the “ready-made Roman town” that could now
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Figure . RAF aerial photomosaic taken on July , , at Caistor St. Edmund, showing the street grid of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum, Times, March , .
begin, guided by the aerial image. The lead excavator thought the site likely “to throw light on two periods, about which little has hitherto been known – namely, the years immediately before and after the Roman invasion, and the epoch of the first arrival of our Teutonic ancestors.” Britain’s air force, defended from postwar budget cuts on the grounds that it was needed to protect the island nation, was now playing a public role in uncovering that nation’s remote past; air power and the early Teutons touched across time. Crawford, for his part, was more interested in the technical ramifications of the Caistor image, which demonstrated his sense that the past was a kind of photograph waiting to be developed by the contingencies of crops, seasons, moisture, and heat. “In conjunction with the sun,” Crawford wrote, such factors “act upon the soil in the same kind of way as a chemical developer acts upon an exposed photographic plate. In both cases there is a latent image; in the one it is a picture, in the other a plan.” By –, however – the years during which Woolf began drafting Between the Acts – Crawford had come to fear that the latent image of the past would be effaced from the British landscape by the activities of the living. The plan views of premodern Britain were best read from above in
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Figure .
Annotated schema of Venta Icenorum by R. E. M. Wheeler that appeared in his article “Caistor, and a Comment,” Antiquity (), .
fields and open downs; afforestation, suburban development, and the plowing and stripping of downland would obscure or eradicate them. As he wrote in “Bloody Old Britain,” his unpublished jeremiad about British material culture, [T]hese field-areas exist to be seen. They are striking and almost sensational, as they are also peculiarly British, relics of the life of our agricultural ancestors two and three thousand years ago. They are of interest to all students and intelligent ramblers just as much as the exhibits in a museum case; and it would be as sensible to keep that case permanently covered as to hide these old fields under a growth of trees.. . . Unless some concerted action is taken they will all vanish before the century is over.
Even as he warned of the ebbing legibility of Britain’s deep past, Crawford decried the material flimsiness of the present from the vantage of the deep future. “An archaeologist of the future,” he wrote, “summarizing the results of excavation of th century British sites and amplifying them from contemporary documentary records, could build up a picture of Britain that would resemble ours.” It would be a picture of unalloyed
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decline – of the “marked degeneration” in craftsmanship that industrialization and standardization had brought when compared with previous centuries. Simply “contrasting the mass-produced but home-manufactured goods of, say, Roman Britain (pots and pans, for instance) with the machine-made goods of th-century Britain,” the archaeologist of the future would see proof of a great falling off. If so, Crawford implied, it was a decline toward the abyss of the next world war, for “Bloody Old Britain” was written, as he put it, “at the end of the first inter-war period.” In his presidential address to the members of the Prehistoric Society, he indicated that to discuss “the future prospects of archaeological airphotography . . . implies an optimistic outlook that I am very far from possessing. Let us leave it at that.” Between the Acts, which Woolf brought to completion during the Battle of Britain and the London Blitz, bears the marks of wartime in its atmosphere of suspense, its moments of small-scale diegetic violence, and its dark geopolitical forecasts. “[T]hings look worse than ever on the continent,” says an unidentified audience member after the pageant, the novel’s central event, which has been briefly interrupted by a squadron of planes overhead. “And what’s the channel, come to think of it, if they mean to invade us? The aeroplanes, I didn’t like to say it, made one think . . .” (). But the novel’s June setting places it a few months before the Nazi invasion of Poland, at the very end of the interwar entr’acte its title names. In that shrinking interval there is still time to stage, in the form of Miss LaTrobe’s pageant, a running history of England beginning with its geological origins: “A child new born / Sprung from the sea / Whose billows blown by mighty storm / Cut off from France and Germany / This isle” (; original emphasis). Still time to sink so deep into Wells’s visions of prehistoric Picadilly that one mistakes, as Lucy Swithin does, a maid coming in with a tray full of blue china for a “leather-covered grunting monster who was about . . . to demolish a whole tree in the green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest” (). And still time for the night that falls around a well-appointed country house in Sussex to be the “night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks” (). “The future shadowed their present,” says Woolf’s narrator of Isa and her guest William Dodge, “like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern” (). But in the held breath of the novel’s war-shadowed moment, the particularities of time and place, conditions and viewers, admit the past and its remains into a condition of legibility.
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Lucy Swithin, pursuing “her imaginative reconstruction of the past” with the help of Wells’s Outline, is “given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into the past or future” (). In this, she incarnates one of Woolf’s signature methods as a fiction writer. We’ve seen examples of how Lucy and other characters in Between the Acts increase the extent and the intensity of the moment by flights into the remote past. The flights into the deep future are rarer in Woolf’s work, but they’re there as well. Amid the motorcar scene in Mrs. Dalloway we find this fantasia, which puts the remains of early twentieth-century London under the spades – or, it may be, the airborne cameras – of future archaeologists: The face itself had been seen only once by three people for a few seconds. Even the sex was now in dispute. But there could be no doubt that greatness was seated within; greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now, for the first and last time, be within speaking distance of the majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state which will be known to curious antiquaries, sifting the ruins of time, when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth. The face in the motor car will then be known. ()
The rhetorical emphasis here may be on how the great persist in historical memory while the masses are forgotten, perduring only as physical remains. But affectively the passage inverts this hierarchy: the faceless, sexless abstraction of “greatness” and “majesty” cannot contend with the sobering materiality of bones, wedding rings, fillings, teeth, and human dust. The bounds of “this moment of June” () are increased not by the fleeting, curtained presence of some head of state but by the fact that London will one day be a grass-grown path, a ruin of time where the Crawfords of the future will survey and sieve the remains of the now living. In , shortly after her friend Lytton Strachey’s death, Woolf would invoke the deep past and future together through an allusion to popular science writer James Jeans’s The Universe Around Us (), all as a way to put erotic possessiveness in perspective. “You know what Jeans says? Civilisation is the thickness of a postage stamp on the top of Cleopatra’s needle; & time to come is the thickness of postage stamps as high as Mont Blanc. Possessiveness is the devil.” Toward the beginning of this chapter I asked what use deep time could have for modernism. Part of what modernism learns from deep time is the negative answer to this question: that even the most innovative cultural
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producers and their works are names written in water. In a whimsical thought experiment, the narrators of the “Ithaca” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses calculate (erroneously, it turns out) that if the ratio of Bloom’s and Stephen’s ages in had remained constant, when the latter reached the age of Methuselah, years, the former would have “been obliged to have been born in , B.C.” Then comes the question, “What events might nullify these calculations?” The response: “The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a new era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent extermination of the human species, inevitable but impredictable” (.–). Lily Briscoe’s thought near the end of To the Lighthouse is more succinct and focused not on human lifespan or extinction but on the artwork’s: “It would be hung in the attics . . . it would be destroyed” (). Amplified by the depopulated time-lapse pastoral of that novel’s middle section, however, such a thought amounts to much the same thing as Ulysses’s extinction forecast. Deep time haunts modernism with the specter of the latter’s obsolescence and eventual disappearance. Modernism may not be able to haunt deep time in return, but it haunts our ideas about deep time and some of our visual confrontations with it as well. During the summer of , record-breaking temperatures were happening in many parts of the world. In the UK and Ireland, roofs buckled and asphalt liquefied. The browning of the British Isles was visible even from high-altitude, low-resolution satellite photos. From lower altitudes, the heat and dryness didn’t just brown the grass – they also restored lost traces of the past to legibility. In Ireland, a wildfire burned away the gorse on Bray Head on the coast of County Wicklow, revealing “EIRE ” written with stones during World War II to let allied and German pilots know that they were flying over a neutral country. In Lasham, Hampshire, airfield taxiways from the same conflict reemerged, traced in yellowing grass on a uniformly mown green. The drowned village of Dartmoor, Devon, abandoned in when its valley was flooded to form a reservoir, was restored to view as the water levels sank. Other geometrically regular cropmarks revealed the locations of a nineteenth-century ornamental garden in Lancashire and an eighteenth-century mansion in Nottinghamshire. Traces of older settlements returned to view as well. Once again the plan view of Venta Icenorum appeared in the Norfolk field where the RAF had first photographed it in . And near the Newgrange monument in Ireland’s County Meath, drone-borne cameras spotted the mandala-like outline of a previously unseen henge dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age.
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In their tendency toward rectilinear and other geometrically regular shapes, these apparitions from the prehistoric and more recent past looked eerily modernist – here a scaled-up analytical cubist portrait in barley or sedge, there a massive Sonia Delaunay circle in the parched sod. But the deeper eeriness of the images belongs to the climate-change uncanny, whereby the carbon-emitting activities of the last eleven generations of human beings return in the alienated, inhuman form of the planet’s altered weather patterns and the deep pasts these can uncover. One of the traits common to every writer, artist, or composer we could consider a modernist is that they contributed to those carbon emissions. That fact in no way distinguishes them from the rest of humanity since the Industrial Revolution. But some of them, among them Virginia Woolf, would have recognized in the incidental modernism of that summer’s cropmarks a kinship with their own projects, which also traced the shapes made by the deep human past’s intersection with the punctual catastrophe of the present. These same shapes testify to the power of the living to press hard on the palimpsest of the world. Deep time is legible through the aperture of the moment. The stylus of the moment writes in the ink of deep time.
Notes To appreciate the truly mammoth difference made by the comma that separates “and her aunts” from the first two items in the list, try the sentence without it. By tricking the eye into expecting “and her aunts” to function as the subject of a new clause, the comma appears to license the aunts’ separation, as living agential beings, from paving stones and boxes of ribbon. When the sentenceending period thwarts that expectation, the taxonomic separation between human beings and other entities is hilariously revoked, the aunts becoming suddenly fungible with boxes, mammoths, stones. May there be, in the ink with which that comma is printed in your copy of this book, bits of the mammoths from Richmond-to-come. These examples allude to Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, ), chapter . Elsewhere in the book, Friedman calls on scholars to provincialize Eurocentric models of “high” modernism. “Instead, we must look across the planet, through deep time, and vertically within each location . . . and then focus our attention on the nature of the particular modernity in question . . .” (; my emphasis). Friedman’s deep time appears to stretch potentially to the beginning of recorded human history but not to what is more typically meant by the phrase, the geological or cosmological time scale. James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage, ), .–. Further citations are in the text by episode number and line number.
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Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, “Introduction: Modernist Poetry in History,” in A History of Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . See, respectively, Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, ); Kelly Sultzbach, Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Susan Scott Parrish, The Flood Year : A Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ); and Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (London: Bloomsbury, ). See Aaron Jaffe, “Introduction: Who’s Afraid of the Inhuman Woolf?” Modernism/modernity (), –; Charles M. Tung, “Baddest Modernism: The Scales and Lines of Inhuman Time,” Modernism/modernity (), –; and Keith Leslie Johnson, “The Extinction Romance,” Modernism/modernity (), –. See Gillian Beer, Wave, Atom, Dinosaur: Woolf’s Science (Tokyo: English Literary Society of Japan, ); Catherine W. Hollis, “Clarissa’s Glacial Skepticism: John Tyndall and ‘Deep Time’ in ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’” in Interdisciplinary/ Multidisciplinary Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Second Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Ann Martin and Kathryn Holland (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, ), –; and Derek Ryan, Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, ), especially chapter . Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt, ), ; further references are cited parenthetically in the text. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, ), ; further references are cited parenthetically in the text. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, ), ; further references are cited parenthetically in the text. Lucy Swithin is reading in H. G. Wells’s Outline of History about a time when England was still connected to the continent and populated by “the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend” (). Charles Tung pursues a similar argument: “Modernism began to inject into the moment and literary form a scaling up and a scoping out to inhuman times” as “a way of grappling with the long-term impact of the fetish for ephemerality and the limitations of narrative as an anthropocentric downscaling device.” Tung, “Baddest Modernism,” . Oliver’s daughter-in-law, Isa, is running her eyes along the library’s shelves, noticing the lives of Garibaldi and Lord Palmerston, then thinks: “Or perhaps not a person’s life; a county’s. The Antiquities of Durham; The Proceedings of the Archaeological Society of Nottingham” (). Crawford is not a figure known to many students of literary modernism, nor until recently has there been much secondary material on his life or work. But
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the art historian Kitty Hauser has now published both a popular biography of Crawford and a scholarly study of early twentieth-century British photography and archaeology in which he features prominently. See Kitty Hauser, Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (London: Granta, ) and Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, & the British Landscape – (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). See, for example, O. G. S. Crawford, “New Discoveries at Stonehenge Made from the Air: Photographs at Feet Revealing a Lost Avenue,” Illustrated London News (August , ), –; and related articles by Crawford in the Observer on July , July , and September of the same year. On the discovery, see Martyn Barber, “Capturing the Material Invisible: O. G. S. Crawford, Ghosts, and the Stonehenge Avenue,” Bulletin of the History of Archaeology (), –. Wessex from the Air (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) would become a visual resource for the next generation of modernist painters in Britain. As Hauser points out, Paul Nash owned a copy and John Piper cited it in a article, “Prehistory from the Air,” in the modernist art journal Axis (Shadow Sites, ). O. G. S. Crawford, “Air-Photography for Archaeologists,” Ordnance Survey Professional Papers, new ser., (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, ), ; original emphasis. Hauser, Shadow Sites, , . Crawford, “Air-Photography for Archaeologists,” . Unsigned, “Seen from the Air,” Times (March , ), . Unsigned, “Caistor Next Norwich: The Roman Town: Disclosures in Air Photograph,” Times (March , ), . Crawford, “Air-Photography for Archaeologists,” . O. G. S. Crawford, “Bloody Old Britain” MS (Bodleian, MS. Crawford –). Ibid. O. G. S. Crawford, “Air Photography, Past and Future: Presidential Address for ,” Proceedings for the Prehistoric Society for , . On Woolf’s grounding of collective identity on the universal persistence of human savagery, see Sam See, “The Comedy of Nature: Darwinian Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Between the Acts,’” Modernism/modernity (), –. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. , –, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Penguin, ), . For a more extended discussion of this passage and of Woolf’s interest in Jeans, see Beer, Wave, Atom, Dinosaur, ff. On the uncanny effects of climate change, see Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –.
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Index
a posteriori languages, ableism, academicism, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Achebe, Chinua, , – Aching, Gerard, aerial photography, , aesthetics of revolution, –, , , affect, – aesthetic affordances of, archive of, – compassion and, – emotion distinguished from, fact and feeling in relation to, – interiority and, – politics of, –, , registrations of, study of, – style and, – theory, , , African diaspora, African American literature, , African American modernism, – Afro-modernity, Ahmed, Sara, airplanes, Allen, Major George W., Alpert, Jane, altermodernism, – Althusser, Louis, Amrouche, Jean El Mouhoub, Anderson, Perry, , Andree, Courtney, Angry Brigade, anthropocene, Anti-Academia Nicaragu¨ense, anticolonialism. See colonialism Antiquity, , Aragon, Louis, archival turn, –
archives affect, of, –, feminism, of, –, – maternality, and, – radical cataloguing, Armstrong, Isobel, , Armstrong, Louis, Arnold, Matthew, , art, , – Art World, artificial darkness, –, artificial languages, – artistic representation (darstellen), , Attridge, Derek, Auden, W. H., – Austin, J. L., Australasian Modernist Studies Network (AMSN), authenticity, black, autonomy, –, , , , , , avant-garde, , , , –, , , , –, –, , , , , Averty, Jean-Christophe, Avery, Todd, Radio Modernism, Baker, Houston A., , Bal, Mieke, Baldick, Chris, Baldwin, James, , Ball, Philip, Banville, Théodore de, Barber-Stetson, Claire, , Barnard Zine Library, Basic English, , –, – Bass, Alan, Battle of Britain, Baudelaire, Charles, Baxter, Katherine Isobel, Bayer, Joella, –, Baynton, Douglas, ,
Index
Bazin, André, Beach, Sylvia, Beasley, Rebecca, , , Beaufront, Louis de, Beauvoir, Simone de, bebop, – Béchet, Sidney, , , Beck, Ulrich, Benstock, Shari, Berger, James, Bernabé, Jean, Bersani, Leo, Bérubé, Michael, –, black Atlantic culture, , black authenticity, Black Lives Matter, black masculinity, black modernism, – Black studies, black technopoetics, –, , blackness, , , –, –, , , , – Blitz, BLAST, Bloom, Emily, The Wireless Past, Bluemel, Kristin, Bock, Martin, Blumenberg, Hans, book of the mind, , book series, modernist, , –, Borde, Raymond, Bornstein, George, Bowen, Elizabeth, –, The House in Paris, , – “Look at All Those Roses,” , , – Boyard, Marie-Léonie, Braddock, Jeremy, , Braggs, Rashida, Brahmoism, Brawley, Benjamin, British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS), – British Poetry Revival, Bronstein, Michaela, Brooker, Peter, Brooks, Cleanth, Brooks, Van Wyck, Brown, Frank, Brzezinksi, Max, , Buddhism, , Buell, Lawrence, Shades of the Planet, , Bungei jidai (Literary Age) magazine, Bu¨rger, Peter, Burke, Carolyn, Burroughs, Edgar Rice,
Bush, Christopher, , , Butler, Judith, Byas, Don, Cahiers du cinéma, Cain, James M., Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, Life Is a Dream, canon, modernist, –, , –, –, , , –, , , , , , , , , Carmody, Todd, Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, Casanova, Pascale, Casillo, Robert, Cassin, Barbara, Caughie, Pamela L., , Centre for European Modernism Studies (CEMS), , Centre for Modernist Cultures, Césaire, Aimé, , , , – Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), , – Chace, Richard, Chalais, François, , Chamoiseau, Patrick, Chaumeton, Etienne, – Chen, Xiaomei, Cheng, Anne, Chevallier, Christian, , – Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese Communist Party (CCP), , –, Chinese revolution, Chiu Bien-Ming, Christianity, –, –, Chude-Sokei, Louis, Churchill, Winston, Cinépanorama, , Clark, Katerina, , Clarke, Kenny, , , , Cole, Sarah, , , Colebrook, Clare, collecting, – collectivism, , collectivities, , , colonialism, –, –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , commodities, , , Communist Manifesto, –, –, compassion, affect and, – computational culture, , – Confiänt, Raphael, Connolly, Cyril,
Index Conrad, Joseph, , , , , , – Heart of Darkness, – The Secret Agent, consolation, , context, – Copeland, Huey, , Couser, G. Thomas, Couturat, Louis, , , , Craig, Cairns, Crawford, O. G. S., – “Air-Photography for Archaeologists,” , – Wessex from the Air, Creole, Cretaceous-Paleogene event, cropmarks, – Crutcher, Leon, Cullaz, Maurice, – Cultural Revolution, , cultural studies, , –, , –, –, –, culture and capitalism, , definition of, flows of, folk, and industrialism, minority, , popular, , , , sound and media, “vertical” dimension of, Curtis, Ian, Cusk, Rachel, Cvetkovich, Ann, Dada, , , , Dameron, Tadd, Darío, Rubén, , – “A Roosevelt,” “Canción de carnaval,” Cantos de vida y esperanza, “Los colores del estandarte,” Los raros, – Prosas profanas, “Salutación del optimista,” Darwin, Charles, , Das, Santanu, Davidson, Michael, Davis, Alex, Davis, Arthur P., Davis, Gregson, Davis, Lennard, Davis, Miles, , –, –, , debabelization, , , –, Décadence, , Decaë, Henri, deconstruction,
deep time, –, – Deineka, Aleksandr, Delaunay, Charles, Delaunay, Sonia, Delon, Alain, Denning, Michael, Derrida, Jacques, , , –, – Archive Fever, Différance, “The Law of Genre,” , “Tympan,” Desani, G. V., , –, description, style and, , diaspora, African, Díaz Rodríguez, Manuel, différance, Digimodernism, Dimock, Wai Chee, Shades of the Planet, , disability, – disability studies, , , –, disenchantment, Dobrenko, Evgeny, Dolmage, Jay, Doyle, Laura, Du Bois, W. E. B., , , , Duffy, Enda, Durkheim, Émile, , Dussel, Enrique, –, Dylan, Bob, Eagleton, Terry, Exiles and Emigrés, , Eazy-E (Eric Lynn Wright), ecocriticism, , economics, , –, –, Edelman, Lee, Egypt, feminism in, – Eichhorn, Kate, The Archival Turn in Feminism, – Elcott, Noam, , Elias, Amy J., The Planetary Turn, Eliot, T. S., –, –, , –, , –, , , , Ellison, Ralph, , –, –, , Eltit, Diamela, emotion, affect distinguished from, – emotional accounts of modernism, , , Engels, Friedrich, –, English, Darby, – Enlightenment, , , environmental humanities, , Erevelles, Nirmala, Esperanto, –, –, – ethics form, of, , , , , , style, of, , ethnic studies,
Index
ethnicity, – ethnography, , , , Eurocentrism, , –, , , –, , excavation, archaeological, , , Eysteinsson, Astradur, fact, affect and, – Falk, Julia S., Fanon, Frantz, Farge, Arlette, – Faulkner, William, – feeblemindedness, feeling, affect, and, –, Felski, Rita, The Limits of Critique, –, feminism. See also gender archives and, – Egypt, in, – modernist studies, and, , , –, , , , , , Feminist Modernist Studies, , Fernald, Anne E., , , Fiedler, Leslie, Figlerowicz, Marta, , film noir, , See also noir “first modernity” theory, fitna, , Flaubert, Gustave, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Fleet Air Arm, Fleissner, Robert S., Ford, Ford Madox, form affective, content and, double form, , emphasis on, Impressionism, in, , loss, and, , social critique, and, –, – temporal perspective on, , formalism, , , , Forster, E. M., A Passage to India, , –, , , “The Machine Stops,” Foucault, Michel, , , , Discipline and Punish, Fox, Ann, Frank, Andre Gunder, Franks, Matt, Frazer, James, Freed-Thall, Hannah, , Freedman, Joanna, Freud, Sigmund, , , , Friedman, Susan Stanford, Planetary Modernisms, –, , , , , –, Frost, Laura, Fry, Roger,
Futurism, , , , Futurists, , –, , futurity, , –, Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, Garvey, Marcus, Garvía, Roberto, Gasiorek, Andrzej, Gay, Peter, gender. See also feminism colonialism, and, –, , disability, and, – language, and, neutral, , new modernist studies, in, , –, queer theory, and, race, and, , religion, and, , , , taxonomy, and, , , , Giddens, Anthony, Gikandi, Simon, Gilded Age, , Gillespie, Dizzy, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, , Herland, –, , With Her in Ourland, global modernism, , , , , Goble, Mark, Godard, Jean-Luc, À bout de souffle, Gold, Mike, , Goldman, Emma, Goldstone, Andrew, – Gómez Carrillo, Enrique, – De Marsella a Tokio, sensaciones de Egipto, la India, la China y el Japón, Góngora, Luis de, Gordin, Michael D., , Gorky, Maxim, –, Grasset, Pierre, Gravendyk, Hillary, Great Depression, – Greco, Juliette, Groussac, Paul, Guérin, Roger, Gu¨nther, Hans F. K., H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), , , The Flowering of the Rod, , , – Halliday, Sam, Hammons, David, Hardy, Thomas, Harlem Renaissance, , –, Hartman, Saidiya, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, , Hassan, Ihab,
Index Hayot, Eric, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, Hayter, Irena, Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of History, , Heller, Scott, Hemingway, Ernest, , Henke, Suzette, Henry, Holly, Higginson, Pim, , – Hikomaro, Saito, Hinduism, – Hirsch, Marianne, , historicism, –, , , , Hollinghurst, Alan, Holm, David, , Holmes, Oliver Wendell, , Homer, , The Iliad, Hsy, Jonathan, Hu Lanqi, Hughes, Langston, , Hurston, Zora Neale, , , , –, , , Huyssen, Andreas, , , Hylaeans, Hypermodernism, – Ido, –, –, – illness, –, –, Illustrated London News, imprecision instrument, , See also global modernism; weak theory Impressionism, form in, , Impressionist art, investment in, insurance, social, , interdisciplinarity, –, , –, , –, –, , , interiority, , – interlinguistics, –, , , , See also debabelization intermediality, , Intermodernism, International Archives for the Women’s Movement, International Auxiliary Language (IAL), , –, –, See also universal language invisibility, , –, , , Ishiguro, Kazuo, Islam, , –, , See also fitna; Qur’an; veil, the James, Henry, , , , Jameson, Frederic, , , , Jameson, Storm, , , – A Day Off, – “Documents,”
jazz, , –, – Jeans, James, The Universe Around Us, Jenkins, Lee M., Jespersen, Otto, –, , Jevons, William Stanley, Johnson-Roullier, Cyraina, , Joyce, James, , , , , , , , , –, , , “The Dead,” Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, , , , , , , , –, , Kafer, Alison, Kafka, Franz, Kalinak, Kathryn, Kandinsky, Wassilly, Kant, Immanuel, , Kempf, Christopher, Keiller, Alexander, Wessex from the Air, Kenner, Hugh, –, , Kermode, Frank, Khrzhanovsky, Ilya, Dau (film), Kiaer, Christina, Kikuchi, Yūhō, Kim, Eunjung, Kramnick, Jonathan, Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, Laity, Cassandra, , , , , , language artificial, – gender, and, universal, –, –, –, Landau, Lev, Larsen, Nella, Latham, Sean, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, Latin, , –, , , – Latin America, , , , , , , , , See also Spanish America Latino sine Flexione, , Latour, Bruno, Lawrence, D. H., , , , Lazarus, Neil, Leibniz, Gottfried, , Leigh, Glenda, Leitch, Vincent, Lesbian Herstory Archives, Lewis, Pericles, Lewis, Wyndham, , – “The Meaning of the Wild Body,” Men without Art, Tarr, The Wild Body, Ligon, Glenn, , –, – Lincoln, Sarah L.,
Index
Linett, Maren Bodies of Modernism, , Linton, Simi, literature, world, , –, , – Litz, A. Walton, Liu, Kang, Longworth, Deborah, loss, form, and, , Loy, Mina, , , , , –, “Alda’s Beauty,” “Feminist Manifesto,” , , , “Gloria Gammage,” “O Hell,” “Pazzarella,” Lu Xun Art Academy, , Luhan, Mabel Dodge, , Lukács, Georg, , Lyon, Janet, , MacGowan, Christopher, Mackay, Charles, madness, –, – Mallarmé, Stéphane, , Malle, Louis, , Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, – MAMA movement, , – mammoths, , – Manganiello, Dominic, manifesto (genre), , , , –, –, –, See also Communist Manifesto Manus, Rosa, , Mao, Douglas, –, , , , Mao Zedong, –, Marcus, Jane, Marsh, Nicky, Martí, José, Martin, Tony, Martin, Trayvon, , Martz, Louis, Marx, Karl, , , , Communist Manifesto, – Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marxism, , Marxist literary criticism, , , , masculinity, black, Mason, Charlotte Osgood, Massumi, Brian, Matz, Jesse, , May Fourth Movement (China), , , McDiarmid, Lucy, McEwan, Ian, McGann, Jerome, McLuhan, Marshall, McPhee, John, Basin and Range, McRuer, Robert,
Meixner, Laura, – Melville, Jean-Pierre, Deux hommes dans Manhattan, , – Le Samouraï, Mendelssohn, Anna, , , –, –, “Abschied,” – “Hungary Water,” poem beginning, “But that wasn’t what – unreceptivity,” poem beginning “Ham banks counter machines slicers grills,” poem beginning “poetry is the lack,” poem beginning “to have some stupid bloke laughing and giggling,” “two secs.,” “The wrong room,” Michaels, Walter Benn, Michelot, Pierre, , Mickalites, Carey James, “microaggressions,” , microscopes, Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, Miller, J. Hillis, , Mitchell, David, , Modern Language Association (MLA), , , –, modernism, – avant-garde, and, , , , – disenchantment, and, emotional accounts of, , , ethics of form, and, , , , , , global, –, , , –, legacies of, , , , literary consolation, and, , planetary modernisms, , , –, , risk society, and, – Modernism/modernity (journal), , , – modernisme, modernismo, , , – Modernismus, modernist cultural studies, , “Modernist Inhumanisms,” Modernist Network Cymru, Modernist Studies Association (MSA), , , –, conferences, , – founding of, , influence on formation of other professional organizations, mission statement/purpose, , Modernist Studies in Asia Network, Modernist Studies Ireland,
Index
modernistas, , – modernity, , –, , , – Monnier, Adrienne, , Moody, James, Moore, ‘Big Chief ’ Russell, Moraru, Christian, The Planetary Turn, Moréas, Jean, , Moreau, Jeanne, – Moretti, Franco, Morrison, Toni, Mouéllic, Gilles, Mulhern, Francis, Mu¨ller, Oliver, Mundial Magazine, myth, , , , , –, , , –, ,
Observer, occultism, Ogden, C. K., , , , – Debabelization, – The Meaning of Meaning, Ordnance Survey’s Archaeology Office, Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ostwald, Wilhelm,
Napoléon III, Naremore, James, “narrative prosthesis,” nation, the, , , nationalism, , , –, négritude, , – neoliberalism, , neorealism, Nestle, Joan, New Criticism, –, , , New Left, “New Modernisms,” –, , , –, new modernist studies (NMS) assessment of newness, , , , – brand, as, –, , , canon formation, and, –, , , definition of, emergence of, –, – ethnicity, and, – feminism, and, , , , , gender in, , historicism in, –, , , , history of, – interdisciplinarity of, –, , , international currency of, , , introduction to, – quantitative analysis of, –, , – race in, , viability of rubric, , , weak theory in, , New Negro Movement, –, See also Harlem Renaissance New Zealand Modernist Studies Consortium, Nicholls, Peter, , Nielsen, Kim, Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nixon, Rob, noir (film),
Page, Oran Thaddeus “Hot Lips,” Panassié, Hugues, Paris, –, –, , , Paris International Jazz Festival, – Paris Salon, Parker, Charlie, Parsons, Cóilín, Paz, Octavio, Peano, Giuseppe, , periphery, –, , , Perry, Margaret, Petrov, Petre, Pinkney, Tony, planetarity, – planetary modernisms, , , –, Platonov, Andrei, Poe, Edgar Allan, political representation (vertreten), , Pollock, Griselda, , postcolonial literature, postcolonial studies, , , , , , , postcoloniality, postmodernism, –, , , , , , , postsecularism, post-structuralism, , , Pound, Ezra, , –, , –, –, , , Powers, Richard, The Overstory, precarity, , –, Prehistoric Society, Présence Africaine, professional organizations, Proust, Marcel, , , publishing, modernist, – Puchner, Martin, , –, – Pulsifer, Rebecah,
le noir, – Nordau, Max, , North, Joseph, Literary Criticism, A Concise Political History, –, North, Michael, , , , Nugent, Richard Bruce, , , –, “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” , –,
Index
quantitative analysis, , , – Quayson, Ato, queer studies, , , queer theory, , –, Qur'an, , race studies, , , racialization, racism, , , –, , Radek, Karl, radical cataloguing, Rainey, Lawrence, –, Raley, Rita, Rancière, Jacques, Rankine, Claudia, , –, – realism, –, –, , –, , – À la recherche du jazz, records and recording (audio), , – Reinhardt, Django, religion, gender, and, , , , religious studies, , –, Renoir, Jean, Toni, representation artistic representation (darstellen), , political representation (vertreten), , Retman, Sonnet H., revolution aesthetics of, –, , , Bolshevik, – Chinese, feminist, , Richards, I. A., , – Riddel, Joseph, risk, future and, risk society, modernism, and, – Rodas, Julia, Rogers, Charlotte, Rogers, Gayle, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, Romanticism, , –, , Ronet, Maurice, Roof, Judith, Rosà, Rosa, Ross, Kristin, Ross, Stephen, , , , , Royal Air Force, , Royal Navy Air Force. See Fleet Air Arm Rukeyser, Muriel, Russell, Bertrand, – Saint-Amour, Paul Tense Future, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” , , , , , , , , – Saint-Point, Valentine,
Salon de Refusés of , Samuels, Ellen, Sanchez, Rebecca, Sapir, Edward, , –, Sarker, Sonita, Sartre, Jean-Paul, scalability, , Schild, Kathryn, , Schotter, Jesse, Schuyler, George, Black No More, , , – science, , , , , , , , –, , , , , science fiction, , , Scott, Bonnie Kime, Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, secularism, –, , , Sedgwick, Eve, Servitje, Lorenzo, Seshagiri, Urmila, Shaarawi, Huda, Harem Years, , – shadowtime, Shepherd, Elizabeth, – Shih, Shu-meh, , Siao, Emi, – Siebers, Tobin, Simmons, Art, Singh, Amardeep, , Siskind, Mariano, Slezkine, Yuri, Smith, Zadie, Snyder, Sharon, , social insurance, – socialist realism, , , Société d’études modernistes (SEM), Society of Novel Studies, Solal, Martial, , , – sound and media culture, Soviet Writers’ Congress (), –, Spanish America, , –, See also Latin America speculation, –, – speculative fiction, , – speed, – Spieler, Barney, Spivak, Gayatri, Death of a Discipline, , , , , Stäheli, Urs, , Stalin, Joseph, –, , – Stalinism, , , , – Stal’skii, Suleiman, Steedman, Carolyn, , Stein, Gertrude, , , Steinman, Lisa, Stephen, Leslie,
Index Steven, Mark, Stewart, Kathleen, Stoler, Ann, , Stovall, Tyler, Strachey, Lytton, style affect, and, – description, and, , ethics of, , mode of thought, as, transformation, as, – Surrealism, surveillance, sonic, synthetic neologism, Szalay, Michael, Szendy, Peter, , – Tagore, Rabindranath, , –, –, , – Gora, – Tannenbaum, Judith, Tatlin, Vladimir, Taylor, Julie, taxonomy, –, , , –, technology, , , , , , , , , , , , technopoetics, black, , –, telescopes, Thacker, Andrew, , theatricality, , , , Theosophy, Tichi, Cecelia, Toomer, Jean, , , Tournès, Ludovic, transformation, style as, – translation, –, – Tsurayuki, Kino, Tung, Charles M., Tzara, Tristan, universal language, , –, – Ugarte, Manuel, Umansky, Laurie, Unkeless, Elaine, untranslatables, – Urtreger, René, V Collective, Valente, Joseph, Vallejo, César, Van Vechten, Carl, , veil, the, , – Venturi, Robert, Verlaine, Paul, ,
violence invisibility, and, , –, – patriarchal, , Virago Press, visibility, invisibility, and, , –, , , , , Viswanathan, Gauri, von Hallberg, Robert, – Vorticism, Waggoner, Jess, Walkowitz, Rebecca L. –, , , , Bad Modernisms, , A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism, Wallerstein, Immanuel, war, , –, , , , , Waugh, Patricia, weak theory, , , , , , , weakness, , , –, –, , –, , Weaver, Harriet Shaw, Weaver, Warren, Weber, Max, , , Weheliye, Alexander, , Wellek, René, Wells, H. G., , , –, –, , , , – “The Country of the Blind,” The Invisible Man, , , –, – The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Outline of History, , – The Shape of Things to Come, The Time Machine, The War in the Air, Weston, Jessie, Whale, James, white supremacy, –, whiteness, , , , Whittier-Ferguson, John, Whittington, Ian, Whitworth, Michael, Wicke, Jennifer, Wiener, Norbert, Wilde, Oscar, , Wilen, Barney, Williams, Raymond, Williams, William Carlos, –, , Wilson, Edmund, Wilson, Woodrow, Winkiel, Laura, WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ,
Wollaeger, Mark, –, , , Woolf, Virginia, , , –, –, , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , –, Between the Acts, –, , – Mrs. Dalloway, , To the Lighthouse, –, , , , , The Voyage Out, The Years, World Center for Women’s Archives, world literature, , –, , –
Index Xi Jinping, , Xiao San, Yan’an Conference (), , , – Yasunari, Kawabata, Yeats, W. B., , , Yurchak, Alexei, , Zack, Naomi, Zamenhof, L. L., –, Zambra, Alejandro, – Zhdanov, Andrei, –, Zwerdling, Alex, –