Transatlantic Modernisms

Matthew Eatough

5 Transatlantic Modernisms Abstract: Modernist literature was more self-consciously transatlantic than perhaps any modern literature to come before it. This chapter surveys how the journeys of both persons and ideas across the Atlantic helped to shape modernism into the movement we know today. To do so, it first examines the canonical American expatriate authors (Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound) who were largely responsible for the initial institutionalization of modernism. The chapter then proceeds to show how this expatriate modernism was produced in tension with other transatlantic spaces and ideologies – primitivism’s turn to African and Native American vitalism, African appropriations of modernism style, and international feminism, among others. Ultimately, I argue that in order to fully understand modernism’s formal experiments, we need to place the period’s literary productions within a broad understanding of the ‘Atlantic’ as a space of intersecting literary, cultural, and ideological projects. Key Terms: Primitivism, the West, imperialism, international feminism, American expatriates

1 Introduction To the eyes of a mid-nineteenth-century observer catapulted fifty years into the future, modernist literature would have been a strange sight indeed. During the period that stretched from roughly the 1880s to the 1940s in Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and that continued well on into the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond in the Caribbean and parts of Africa, modernist literature broke with many of the most hallowed conventions of the nineteenth century. Gone was the realist novel that had been used to such effect in the works of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. Gone were the traditional meter, rhyme schemes, and stanza forms that had shaped the poetry of Alfred Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Gone were the melodramas and burlesques that had thrived in London’s theater district. In their place sprang up a variety of formally inventive works that sought new ways to represent the world. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and other modernist novelists turned to stream-of-consciousness narration in the hopes of showing how individual minds experience the world. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and other modernist poets abandoned constraining rhyme schemes and championed instead ‘free verse.’ And Henrik Ibsen’s naturalist plays opened the theater to new, controversial subject matters, from women’s liberation to sexually transmitted diseases.

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These modernist writers were reacting against what has often been called a “crisis of representation” (Lewis 2007, 3). The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries witnessed a number of developments in politics, philosophy, and the sciences that undermined Victorian certainties about the world. Karl Marx’s Das Capital (1867; English translation, 1887) reimagined capitalism as an inherently contradictory and exploitative system, a view which flew in the face of Victorian beliefs about the fundamentally uplifting and progressive nature of capitalism. Shortly thereafter, World War I shattered Europeans’ faith in the progressive and rational nature of liberalism, and pushed many toward socialism and fascism. In the field of philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche proposed that ‘truth’ was merely a trick of language, a convention that had become naturalized through frequent use, and that all ‘truths’ were merely habitual ways of thinking that were passed down from generation to generation (Nietzsche 1979). This view was in many ways confirmed by the psychologist Sigmund Freud’s work on human consciousness, which revealed that a good portion of the mind was made of up sexual urges and fixations that were closed to conscious perception. And in the sciences, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity upended the Newtonian theory of absolute space and time, which had guided work in the physical sciences for over 200 years. All of these developments pointed to a world that was becoming increasingly unfamiliar to modernist writers, and which seemed to demand new forms of art and literature that could register and represent this newly-strange world. Most apropos to this chapter, these literary experiments took place within an environment that was more self-consciously transatlantic than perhaps any other in the history of modern literature. When modernism first began to be codified as a distinct aesthetic field in the first half of the twentieth century, initially in little magazines like The Little Review, The Egoist, and The Criterion (cf. Scholes and Wulfman 2010), and then as an academic sub-specialty in the Anglo-American academy, the voyage across the Atlantic came to occupy the role of founding myth. For the American critic Hugh Kenner, for example, whose writings on modernism largely defined the field in the 1960s and 1970s, English-language modernism was created through a collision between American and European cultures, with American writers contributing a new, “inexperienced […] intensity” to a Europe that was the epitome of high culture, but which had ossified into an unchanging monument to past achievements (Kenner 1971, 4). Its leading figures were thus, to borrow Terry Eagleton’s well-worn phrase, “exiles and émigrés,” expatriate authors who brought a new cosmopolitan sensibility to a British literary scene that had become stodgy, sedimented, and resistant to change (Eagleton 1970, 1). This is the world of Henry James, whose heroes and heroines came to represent the American search for high culture in the drawing-rooms of Europe, and its fulfillment in the long, winding, and beautiful Jamesian sentence, itself as much a work of art as the novels that housed it (↗8 Henry James); of Ezra Pound, who would import into Britain the radical politics and poetics sweeping the European Continent, from the avant-garde manifesto to the experimental techniques that it advocated; and of T. S. Eliot (↗8 Henry James), who would theorize a Euro-Ameri-

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can cultural community in such essays as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “What Is a Classic?”, and whose own poetry would constitute one of the most lasting expressions of Anglo-American modernism (cf. Zwerdling 1998; Giles 2002). Like any good story, this narrative has an element of truth to it. While Walter Benjamin may have anointed Paris the “capital of the nineteenth century,” by the twentieth century Paris had transformed into the center of the bohemian art world, and the city exerted a profound pull on British and American writers alike (Benjamin 2007 [1955], 146). British and particularly American writers flocked to Paris, and the dialogues that these writers undertook with one another – and with other émigré artists from across Europe – helped to shape the modernist movement into the thing we know today. Paris became the meeting place for radical, avant-garde artists, and the artists and intellectuals who traveled to Paris to partake in its energetic arts scene created a unique, cosmopolitan environment. National traditions met, mingled, and produced something radically new, art forms that were neither French, nor American, nor British, nor any other recognizable European nationality: impressionism, cubism, Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, and, of course, literary modernism. The artistic fervor swirling in Paris quickly spread to other cosmopolitan cities, and by the time World War I broke out, London, Berlin, and Vienna all possessed vibrant circles of modernist intellectuals. Modernism first became truly international in these urban centers where expatriates like Pound and Eliot could create new, radically inventive forms of art within a welcoming environment of social, political, and artistic change (Williams 1989). But modernism was never just this collection of exiles and expatriates, and defining modernism through this heroic narrative of exile and migration obscures other, competing modernisms, especially feminist, queer, black, and working-class modernisms. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, feminist critics started to dispute the male-centered narrative of modernism presented by Hugh Kenner and other modernist critics. These feminist critics produced a number of ground-breaking monographs and anthologies that recovered important female voices from the period and showed how Anglo-American modernism would not have been possible without such key female figures as Virginia Woolf, H. D., Mina Loy, and Margaret Anderson (e.g., Gilbert and Gubar 1988–1994; Benstock 1986; Scott 1990). Soon after, postcolonial critics argued that modernist criticism contained a similar blindness to colonial and immigrant modernisms (cf. Mao and Walkowitz 2006). As postcolonial criticism revealed, modernism did not ‘end’ after World War II, as had commonly been thought, but instead traveled to new spaces and communities. Modernist-style little magazines emerged in the 1920s through the 1960s in South Africa (Voorslag), Guyana (Bim), Nigeria (Black Orpheus), and Ghana (Okyeame) (Bulson 2012); the first generation of post-World War II Caribbean immigrants – the so-called ‘Windrush generation,’ named for the ship that brought over the first wave of immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago – embraced modernist techniques as a means to emphasizing their difference from the dominant English culture (Brown 2013); and magical realist writers adapted modern-

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ist experimentalism into a vehicle that could illuminate non-Western understandings of the world (Zamora 1995). It would not be until the expatriate narrative of modernism was displaced from its central position in modernist studies that the field would be able to trace the connections between modernist form and the writings of such noted colonial writers as Mulk Raj Anand, Jean Rhys, William Plomer, Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, and George Lamming, among others. To speak of a ‘transatlantic’ modernism, then, demands a double effort. It requires that we understand both how one particular transatlantic voyage came to be codified within modernism’s central institutions, as well as how other journeys across the Atlantic competed with, supplemented, and entered into dialogue with what we now know as ‘international’ modernism. Ever since Paul Gilroy’s ground-breaking book The Black Atlantic (1993) proposed that black migrations across the Atlantic constituted an alternative form of transatlantic culture (↗19 The Black Atlantic), transatlantic studies has sought to reimagine the Atlantic as a plural space that cannot simply be described from the vantage point of the largely white, male, and middle-class authors who sought to establish an Anglo-American literary culture bridging the Atlantic. In the case of modernist studies, this expanded understanding of ‘the Atlantic’ has gained momentum from several key developments in transatlantic theory, including the turn to print culture and reception theory characteristic of the ‘new’ world literature (e.g., Damrosch 2003), the interest in anthropological accounts of migration spurred by James Clifford’s Routes (1997), and Marxist efforts to historicize the emergence of ‘the West’ within a wider Atlantic economic system (Lazarus 1999, 16–67). Each of these methodologies has enabled modernist scholars to develop new accounts of modernist literature that redefine both what ‘the Atlantic’ is and how these different Atlantics have influenced modernism’s experimental forms. Indeed, if there is any consensus about ‘the transatlantic’ in modernist studies today, it is that this term can never be reduced to a simple narrative about any one single group, movement, or social space. Modernist experiments were fundamentally concerned with making sense of a world that no longer seemed to play by the old rules, and the conventional cultural geography of the Atlantic was one of the cultural narratives that modernist authors sought to rewrite. In order to illuminate these transatlantic networks, this chapter examines the social, material, and ideological conditions that informed modernism’s transatlantic dimension. It was not accidental that modernism came into its own as a transatlantic movement, as modernist writing was bolstered by – and in large part made possible by – developments in politics, urban life, transportation, anthropology and ethnography, and by imperial expansion that made transnational connections easier than in previous years. In the remainder of this chapter, I trace how these material conditions affected the type of experimental writing that we have come to associate with modernism, as well as how they transformed modernist writing into a truly global movement.

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2 Transatlantic Culture and the European Ideal A new movement is always to some extent based in a new ideology, and modernism was no exception. At the same time as modernist writing was taking shape as a distinctly ‘international’ movement, many modernist writers sought to theorize the nature of such a newly-international culture. What this ‘international’ space was presumed to be could vary from modernist to modernist, but there was a general consensus among modernist writers that the culture they inhabited possessed some form of supranational foundation – call it ‘Europe,’ ‘the West,’ or simply ‘the cosmopolitan.’ Each of these terms possessed its own unique politics and intellectual history, and by no means should they be seen as synonymous with one another. Rather, they are symptomatic of a historical moment characterized by a growing international consciousness within Europe, the United States, and much of the colonial world, a consciousness that manifested itself in art and literature, but also in contemporary works in politics, economics, philosophy, and anthropology. Within this climate, the space of ‘the international’ became a site in which a number of different artistic and political programs fought with one another for cultural legitimation. This collective impulse to delineate and define an international space was rooted in modernism’s unique historical circumstances. Ever since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia divided Europe up into a collection of independent states, Europeans had tended to think of themselves first and foremost as citizens of a particular nation. Up to and including the moment of modernism, most Europeans would not have referred to themselves as Europeans – one was either a Briton, or a German, or a Frenchman, and so on. This tendency to identify with a given national identity was exacerbated by the growing nationalist sensibility that was sparked by the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848, as well as by the nineteenth-century rise of racial theory. Especially in the case of countries such as Great Britain and the United States, who on the surface would seem so close to one another in language, ethnicity, and culture, the staking out of distinct national characteristics became loaded with ideological significance. Matthew Arnold’s “Civilization in the United States” (1886), for example, shows just how anxious writers could be to draw lines between national cultures. American literature, Arnold writes, is distinguished by a “want of what is elevated and beautiful, of what is interesting” – in short, of what Arnold called “culture” (1888 [1886], 181). An American writer like Mark Twain would respond that what Arnold saw as English “culture” was really a collection of old-fashioned, outdated ways of thinking that held neither the political nor the aesthetic allure of American pragmatism, democracy, and modernity – a lack that he dramatizes in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) when Hank Morgan, the novel’s main character, literally attacks the chivalrous and aristocratic Anglo culture that had become so popular in the southern United States, as he travels back in time to King Arthur’s day and slaughters Arthur’s barbaric knights in a bloodbath of gunfire and dynamite. For Twain, clearly, American

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industrial modernity trumped English culture in the most basic, material sense  – modern machines are better than old, backward customs. By the 1870s, however, the primacy of national identity had started to be displaced by two recent developments: one the one hand, the rise of international socialism; and, on the other hand, the rise of the ‘New Imperialism.’ Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) had experienced a lukewarm reaction after the failed 1848 revolutions, and it was not until the late 1870s that new editions of the Manifesto began to proliferate across Europe and the United States (Puchner 2006, 33–46). But when these new editions did finally appear, they exploded onto the scene. In the brief period from 1878 to 1886, the Manifesto ran through 37 different editions that included most of the major European languages. One could point to many reasons for the belated popularity of Marx’s writings, from the rise of mass democracy and mass literacy to the recent rise of international trade (made possible in large measure by advances in shipping and communications technology). More important to the development of modernist literature, though, was the fact that Marx’s writings encouraged workers to think themselves in international terms. The First and Second Internationals framed politics as a global issue that needed to be confronted from an international perspective, and the visibility of these associations led both socialists and other radical political movements, such as the women’s suffrage movement (Lyon 1999, 92–123) and the anticolonial movement (Edwards 2003), to mobilize on an international level, as scholars interested in transatlantic print culture have shown. Marxian socialism also found a direct path into modernist literature through the form of the manifesto, which became the privileged vehicle through which avant-garde movements from the futurists to the surrealists expressed their break with artistic conventions and called upon an international artistic community to join them in their work (Puchner 2006). At the same time as interest in Marxism was waxing, European empires were aggressively expanding their colonial territories in Africa and Asia. After diamonds were discovered in South Africa in 1867, European nations engaged in a so-called ‘Scramble for Africa,’ during which the continent was carved up into several arbitrarily-defined colonies. China and other parts of Asia were likewise divided up into ‘spheres of influence’ that granted preferential trading rights to specific European countries. In the midst of this flurry of imperial activity, historians, political economists, and journalists started to reflect on the motivations behind what the political economist J. A. Hobson dubbed “the New Imperialism.” For Hobson, the New Imperialism was seen as a way for capitalists to develop new markets for their goods at a time when the global economy was in the midst of a prolonged downturn (the Long Depression of 1873–1896) (cf. Hobson 1965 [1902]). For others, the realities of imperial rivalry led to a reconsideration of such pressing topics as empire, ethnicity, and the nature of governance. The most influential expression of this line of thinking was the historian J. R. Seeley’s Expansion of England (1883), which re-envisioned the British Empire as a federal state encompassing Britain and the white Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa). Seeley believed that only this federal

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state would be strong enough to overcome the geopolitical challenges presented by Germany, Russia, and the United States, all of whom were becoming more and more active on the international stage in the 1880s. On the surface, Seeley’s call for a federal state unified by English ethnicity could not look any more different from Hobson’s anti-imperial liberalism. But both tracts speak to a new international sensibility that was struggling to understand the nature of the connection between nation-states and what lay outside them, from nations’ imperial possessions, to their competition with rival imperial powers, to the international dimension of culture and society. A key date for this newly ‘international’ sensibility is 1878, when Henry James published his novel The Europeans. James’s Europeans represents one of the first and most lasting articulations of a broader ‘European’ identity, one that is fundamentally different from any particular national identity. James’s protagonists, Eugenia Münster and her brother Felix Young, have a father who was born in Sicily to American parents, a mother who was born in the United States, and were themselves born in France and Vienna, respectively. Felix and Eugenia’s rootlessness marks them as ‘cosmopolitan,’ a term that was recently coming into vogue as a way to describe the transnational lifestyle embraced by artists, intellectuals, and the leisure class. James refers to this “cosmopolite spirit” in a contemporaneous essay, “Occasional Paris” (1877), as one which tries “to convince you that national virtues are numerous, though they may be different, and to make downright preference really very hard” (1883 [1877], 76). And, indeed, Felix and Eugenia have problems choosing between the national identities that present themselves for possible identification and internalization. When pressed by his American cousin Gertrude to say what he is, Felix can only answer in a series of negations – not “Sicilian, no,” nor French (“Heaven forbid!”), nor even American. The closest that Felix can come to a national label is that he is, as Gertrude says, “a foreigner of some sort,” though he admits that he “doesn’t think we ever had any occasion to settle the matter” of national identity (James 2008 [1878], 22–23). What really stands out about James’ treatment of Felix and Eugenia’s ‘European’ identity is that it is partly a mixture of all European nationalities, and partly a transcendence of any specific nationality. James blurs the line between these two alternatives by placing the siblings in the United States, where their ‘Europeanness’ can act as a contrast to both one particular national identity (American) and to what James thought of as America’s unfortunate lack of “history” and “high civilization” (1984 [1879], 351). Felix and Eugenia travel to rural New England to find a new husband for Eugenia after the collapse of her marriage to the Prince of the fictional Silberstadt-Schreckenstin, and the novel becomes a classic comedy of manner as Felix, Eugenia, and their American relations constantly misunderstand one another. Eugenia’s stylized manner, which flaunts her familiarity with numerous European cultures, “perplexe[s] and weigh[s] upon” the Americans she meets, both because it is a mask that does not seem to hide any authentic national identity and because it hints at refinements unavailable to Americans (2008 [1878], 31). Yet James’s point is not that Americans are simply doomed to cultural backwardness. Rather, by granting his

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expatriate siblings the title “the Europeans,” James subtly implies that it is actually Americans who make the best Europeans. Their rootlessness, partly a product of exile and partly a product of America’s allegedly underdeveloped culture, provides Felix and Eugenia with the critical distance necessary to become cosmopolitan ‘Europeans’ in a way that actual Europeans can never quite be. The notion of Europe that we see in James’s novel was given a theoretical footing by T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent” (1919). The essay begins by positing that there is in fact an identifiable “European” tradition in literature. According to Eliot, every valuable work of “European” literature is permeated “with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and a simultaneous order” (1975a [1919], 38). As with James’s Europeans, this argument is fundamentally an incorporating gesture. Eliot summons the category “European literature” into existence in the very act of naming it, giving what would otherwise be a vague, shapeless idea a solid substance. In Eliot’s eyes, a “tradition” is not the expression of an unchanging national “spirit,” but is rather “the relations, proportions, [and] values of each work of art toward the whole” (1975a [1919], 38). What this means is that new poems, novels, and plays determine what the European tradition “is,” since it is these texts which “readjust” the “order” of the “whole” (1975a [1919], 38). In other words, as each new text is added to the European “tradition,” it changes the very being of that tradition, which has to adapt in order to welcome in the new work: older works are given new inflections and meanings from the new addition, and the new work expands the European literary tradition in a new direction. As Eliot was well aware, this definition of ‘tradition’ opened a space for American authors to become a part of the European literary tradition. By internalizing this tradition in their works, American writers could proffer their unique American voice as the next logical step in European literature. In this sense, America’s historical differences from Europe were not obstacles for their inclusion in the European arts scene, but were the very stuff out of which tradition was made: their distinctive styles signaled an “individual” contribution that constituted the next step in tradition’s growth (Eliot 1975a [1919], 37). To a large degree, this is precisely what Eliot’s famed poem The Waste Land (1922) seeks to do in its formal and thematic structure. A sprawling five-part poem that speaks in an astonishing number of voices and languages, The Waste Land seems expressly designed to demonstrate Eliot’s thesis (from an essay on James Joyce’s Ulysses) that “contemporary history” is an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy (1975b [1923] 177). The poem rapidly changes setting, with stops in ancient Rome, Carthage, Phoenicia, Elizabethan England, and World War I London, among others. At the same time, Eliot is constantly shifting speakers, and mythic personages such as the Greek seer Tiresias and the Arthurian Fisher King alternate with both ancient voices (e.g., Phlebas the Phoenician) and modern personages (e.g., the fortune teller Madame Sosostris and the homosexual Mr. Eugenides). The guiding motif is fragmentation,

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and by presenting languages, persons, and religions from across Europe’s vast history as a series of fractured, disconnected phenomena, Eliot shows Europe itself to be a fragmented objected, one which lacks any essential wholeness. The poem ends with Eliot’s Fisher King regarding “These fragments I have shored against my ruin” and questioning whether to “set my lands in order” (1936 [1922], 431, 426). Here, as in the rest of the poem, Europe is a fragmented collection of incompatible beliefs, actions, and traditions, and it is up to the blind seer Tiresias, an Alter ego of Eliot’s in the poem, to “unit[e] all the rest,” as Eliot suggests in one of his footnotes to the poem (Eliot 1936 [1922], 52). It is the American Eliot, in other words, who must step in and resolve the social fragmentation that many modernists believed Europe to have settled into, and to do so through the formal structure of his poem, juxtaposing as it does incongruous elements that are gathered together into one whole. The European tradition only becomes the European tradition because Eliot is there to make it so. Of course, American writers were not the only ones to use the idea of Europe to embrace an international perspective. In England, the writers and artists associated with the Bloomsbury Group often appealed to ‘Europe’ as a cosmopolitan space whose interests should trump chauvinist nationalism. The Group’s main members, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, E. M. Forster, and the economist J. M. Keynes, all oriented their work toward larger European topics, from the path to lasting peace and economic stability (Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919]), the ethical failings of European imperialism (Leonard Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization [1928]), and to the political project of international feminism (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929] and Three Guineas [1938]). And like James and Eliot, who based their claims to ‘Europeanness’ on their simultaneous participation in and detachment from particular European cultures, Bloomsbury committed itself to an international Europe as a way to distance its members from what they viewed as a restrictive English nationalism. As Rebecca Walkowitz notes of Virginia Woolf, the leading novelist among the Bloomsbury Group and, increasingly after World War I, its central figure, “Woolf saw herself as an ‘outsider,’ and in this way she was a traditional cosmopolitan, detached from her country but attached to artists and to other pacifist and to a community of ‘educated men’s daughters,’ as she puts it in Three Guineas” (81). This belief in a cosmopolitan European community led Woolf and her husband Leonard to publish many of the key works of Anglo-American modernism through their Hogarth Press, including Woolf’s later novels, Eliot’s Waste Land, and the South African writer William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe. It also, perhaps more importantly, gave Woolf and her fellow Bloomsburies a language for articulating their commitments to a transatlantic Anglophone modernism, a language that could avoid accusations that modernist writers were indulging in art for art’s sake and that could reconnect their formal experiments to international political issues. In practice, the Bloomsburian commitment to European internationalism translated into a stylistic concern with the way people perceived the world. Woolf’s novels

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in particular are filled with characters whose social and political beliefs are intertwined with the working of their consciousness and sense perceptions. The best example of this may be the novel Mrs. Dalloway, which uses stream-of-consciousness narration to provide us with glimpses into a number of different characters’ thoughts. Male characters in the novel see the world in ways that, Woolf argues, lead directly to war and mental illness. Peter Walsh, for example, admiringly watches as “Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, theirs arms stuff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England” (1981 [1925], 51). Woolf’s point here is that an attachment to thinking in abstract terms (“duty, gratitude, fidelity, love”) leads men to abandon reason, individuality, and the beauty of everyday life in favor of the violence of war, and that such militaristic thinking transforms living people into cold, deadened monuments, mere “statues” to their country’s greatness. It is important to note, as well, that Woolf shared this interest in the workings of human consciousness with many other key women modernists, from her fellow countrywoman Dorothy Richardson (the first writer to use stream-of-consciousness narration), to the American writers Charlotte Perkins Gilman (“The Yellow Wallpaper”) and Kate Chopin (The Awakening), to the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. For many women modernists, the turn to inner consciousness was a deliberate strategy used to contest dominant patriarchal discourses and to present women’s experiences in the language of dissidence and the outsider. Woolf’s project – and the project of many of the aforementioned women writers – was thus to disrupt the ways of thinking that led to war, gender inequality, and imperialism and to create in its place an international consciousness that could recognize Woolf’s “community of ‘educated men’s daughters’” (Walkowitz 2006, 81). The lasting effect of Woolf’s voice, both for women’s writing and for the later colonial voices who attached themselves to Bloomsbury in the 1930s and 1940s, speaks to her success in this endeavor.

3 The Other Atlantic Journey: Primitivism, the West, and Colonial Modernism While the term ‘Europe’ held a wide appeal to modernists on both sides of the Atlantic, it was far from the only term used to describe modernism’s international space. Another common modernist model for thinking about European civilization was ‘the West,’ an idea that was popularized in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–1922) and Henri Massis’s Defence of the West (1926). Spengler and Massi were responding to a perceived crisis in European culture, one that allegedly spanned everything from economics and politics to race and culture. Such apocalyptic thinking was far from new, but what distinguished Spengler and Massis’s work from earlier moral panics was how they mapped this crisis onto a crude East/West divide. The

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recent imperial expansion into Africa and Asia had heightened Europeans’ sensitivity to the differences between their cultures and those of the rest of the world, a sensitivity we can see reflected in contemporaneous anthropological studies into the ‘primitive’ mind (e.g., Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think [1910] and Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Lives of Savages [1929]). Spengler and Massis’s concept of ‘the West’ borrowed this us/them language and translated it into an entire ontological system. In Spengler’s Decline of the West, for example, “Western civilization” is described as a type of unitary organism that has grown from a “primitive” state into a more coherent “Culture,” and from thence into an advanced, but unchanging, “Civilization” (1939 [1918–1922], 17, 19). Spengler establishes this centuries-long historical continuity by identifying culture with a metaphysical “soul” whose growth and development is coextensive with the evolution of a particular “Culture” (36). In doing so, he is able to posit that “the West” possesses a historical-cultural “soul” that differentiates it from past and current civilizations from across the world, including Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Aztec, Arab, and Greco-Roman civilizations. Just as important, Spengler assumes that “Western” civilization has entered into its twilight and that a new civilization will at some point supplant it. In the hands of Massis, this intimation is transformed into the rationale for a sensationalistic conflict between “Western” civilization and an incoherent medley of Asian, African, and Russian cultures. (“The future of western civilization, indeed the future of mankind,” writes Massis, “is to-day in jeopardy” from “the awakening of the nations of Asia and Africa, united by Bolshevism” [quoted in Rogers 2012, 57]). Like ‘Europe,’ the term ‘West’ helped to make transatlantic connections possible, but often in unexpected ways. Certainly one obvious application of the term ‘West’ was to gather colonial settler cultures into the Western fold. Spengler was quite insistent that one should no longer refer to a “Continent of Europe” as a metonym for Western culture, and that the “West” formed an organic-spiritual unity that could not be reduced to a single geographic region (1939 [1918–1922], 16). American culture, like Australian, Canadian, or any other settler culture, could thus claim that it was an expression of the same racial-cultural “soul” as found in Europe, as ethnological texts such as Sinclair Kennedy’s The Pan-Angles: A Consideration of the Federation of the Seven English-Speaking Nations (1914) did in fact propose. But the line that thinkers such as Spengler and Massis’s drew between ‘the West’ and the rest of the world also encouraged modernist writers to look across the Atlantic in the other direction, from Europe to Africa and the Americas, in search for a means to regenerate a dying Western civilization. Many modernist artists and writers contrasted the cold, mechanistic, and idealistic life of Europe to what they perceived as the violent, primitive vitalism of Africa and the Americas. For example, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Roger Fry all incorporated aspects of so-called “primitive” cultures into their art and art criticism, sometimes as subject and sometimes as formal technique (Torgovnick 1991). We see such a primitivistic method especially clearly in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907), which adapted the sharp, angular

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structure typical of certain West Africa masks into the fragmented style common to cubist painting. The same could be said of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring (1913), which turned to pagan Russian folk music as a source for new, violent rhythms (Stravinsky’s score and the accompanying choreography of Vaslav Njinsky were so shocking that the ballet’s first performance at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées degenerated into a near riot, during which dozens of audience members were forcibly ejected for fighting with one another.) In the context of Anglo-American literary modernism, the figure who perhaps did more than any other to defend non-Western art and culture as a vital, energetic source of rejuvenation for a decaying European civilization was D. H. Lawrence. Fed up with what he saw as a mechanistic and idealistic civilization, Lawrence left England in self-imposed exile shortly after World War I and traveled extensively throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States. After brief stays in Italy and Australia, Lawrence eventually settled down near Taos, New Mexico, where he lived for the better part of two years in 1922–1923. During this American sojourn, Lawrence became increasingly convinced that Native American culture possessed an intimate understanding of humanity’s “blood-consciousness” (Lawrence 1971 [1922], 173) and that a revival of Native American culture could move the world away from European idealism and toward a more embodied form of consciousness. Lawrence presents this argument most spectacularly in the novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), but it also features in his American tales from this period, such as “The Woman Who Rode Away” and “The Princess.” In these narratives, Lawrence imagines Native American culture as masculine, aloof, and fixated on death. As Lawrence describes it, “the American continent […] [gives] men powerful bodies, but … weigh[s] the soul down and prevents its rising into birth” (1995 [1926], 119). By “soul,” Lawrence means “the individual,” which he saw as the antithesis of human sexuality. Lawrence’s rationale for this view was that sex was connected to the propagation of the species, and that this fact lent sex a supra-individual quality. For Lawrence, individuality and sexual desire are “polarities” that are always in conflict – when the “sex connection” courses through a person, his or her individuality is obliterated by a “new dynamic rhythm” (1971 [1922], 175). In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence wraps this sexual theory in primitivistic language that teeters – and often outright plunges – into fascist tirades against “the rabble” and “democracy” (e.g., 1995 [1926], 119–120). Native American culture is represented as a sexualized collective subject, one with no interest in individuality or ideas, and in the novel Lawrence uses the revival of Aztec religion as a metaphor for the regeneration of human culture writ large. In Lawrence’s eyes, a resuscitated Aztec religion will purge Europe of its mechanistic mindset, just as it purges mechanistic and idealistic thoughts from the mind of Kate Leslie, the novel’s Irish protagonist. What Kate gains in return from the Aztec cult she encounters, though, is a greater connection to her ‘blood-consciousness,’ and it is this connection that Lawrence sees as the only path to growth for European culture. As Kate reflects, “we are at the end of our own

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tether” (Lawrence 1995 [1926], 121). “We must take up the old, broken impulse that will connect us to the mystery of the cosmos again” – the impulses of the body, and the non-European cultures that Lawrence associates with such bodily knowledge (1995 [1926], 121). While the language of regeneration enabled Anglo-American authors to fantasize a primitivist alternative to European culture, it also disclosed a way for those on the outskirts of Europe to claim a place within modernist literary culture. In South Africa, for example, the so-called New Africans, a mission-educated, petit bourgeois intelligentsia devoted to “bridg[ing] the gulf between the old [African] culture and the new technological civilization,” employed the language of regeneration to defend their synthesis of European and African cultures (Nkosi 1965, 97). The group’s rallying cry was in many ways Pixley ka Isaka Seme’s 1906 address to the Royal African Society in London, “The Regeneration of Africa.” In this speech, Seme begins by calling attention to ancient African civilizations that he sees as possessing an equal claim to science, progress, and knowledge – the ancient kingdoms of Ethiopia, Abyssinia, and Zululand foremost among them. If by the time of Seme’s lecture these older cultures had fallen into various states of decay, Seme believed that contact with European industrialism could jolt them “into a new life […] a higher, complex existence” (1906, 407). The rhetorical effectiveness of this argument was based on how it both adopted and reversed the European language of regeneration by casting Africa as a stagnating region in need of “intercourse” with a new “influence” (1906, 406). In terms that closely resemble Spengler’s, Seme argues that “Civilization resembles an organic being in its development […] when the seeds sprout in others soils, new varieties sprout up” (1906, 408). This means that European industrialism can merge together with older African civilizations in order to create a “regenerated” Africa, one that actually move beyond Europe and to “the attainment of [a] higher and advanced standard of life” (1906, 407). For Seme’s intellectual descendants among the New Africans, as well as for many of their South African interlocutors, Seme’s vision of a “regenerated” Africa laid the foundation for a series of modernist experimentations with literary form. Perhaps the most famous example of such experimentation is the poet and academic B. W. Vilakazi’s attempt to translate English rhyme schemes into Zulu poetry. In Inkondlo kaZulu (“Zulu Songs”), Vilakazi struggled to fit Zulu izibongo (“praise poems”) into a range of different English rhyme schemes, from the couplet to rhyming quatrains. Vilakazi’s project was made exceedingly difficult by the structure of the Zulu language, most of whose words “end in [unstressed] vowels, and thus do not permit the variety of sound that makes successful rhyming possible” (Vilakazi 1993 [1938], 78). But Vilakazi justified this project by recourse to what the literary critic David Attwell has called “transculturation […] a combination [in Vilakazi’s poetry] of oral culture, a cross-cultural encounter in a mission classroom, and the process of poetic recollection described in Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (2005, 89). For Vilakazi, as for many modernist writers, it is only when the writer “plays with the physical form” of a poem –

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forcing it into new, never-before-seen forms – that a poem becomes truly ‘modern.’ Thus, shaping izibongo into English rhyme schemes is one way of fusing African and European cultures together into a wholly new, and radically modern, combination, in the very same way as Seme advocates in “The Regeneration of Africa.” This concern with the ‘regenerative’ capacity of colonial and peripheral areas extended well beyond Seme and Vilakazi, and any complete survey would have to take into account other New African writers like H. I. E. Dhlomo, the white South African writers who adopted some of their language and techniques (e.g., William Plomer and Roy Campbell), and the Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset (whose Revista de Occidente was grounded in Spenglerian ideas) (Rogers 2012, 29–63), among many others. But Vilakazi’s poetry and criticism does show us one example of how non-Western writers appropriated the language of modernism so as to reimagine modernism as a more global project. Vilakazi and the New Africans would be followed by the Caribbean writers of the Windrush generation, several prominent members of Nigeria’s Mbari Writers and Artists Club, and magical realists from a Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, all of whom would ultimately employ modernist techniques to open up a space for their writings and cultures within an international literary world-system (↗21 Afropolitan Writing). As modernist scholarship continues to become more and more attuned to modernism’s global reach, so too will our understanding of modernism’s transatlantic dimension continue to evolve away from the canonical narrative of Eliot, Pound, and James, and toward a more plural understanding of multiple transatlantic journeys.

4 Bibliography 4.1 Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. “Civilization in the United States.” 1886. Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America. Boston: Cupples and Heard, 1888. 157–192. Attwell, David. Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” 1955. Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 2007. 146–162. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. Brown, J. D. Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Bulson, Eric. “Little Magazine, World Form.” The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Ed. Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 267–287. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Eagleton, Terry. Exiles and Émigrés: Studies in Modern Literature. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.

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Edwards, Brent H. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. 1922. Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1936. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975a. 37–44. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” 1923. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975b. 175–178. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988–1994. Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. 1902. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965. James, Henry. “Occasional Paris.” 1877. Portraits of Places. London: Macmillan, 1883. 75–95. James, Henry. The Europeans. 1878. New York: Penguin, 2008. James, Henry. “Hawthorne.” Literary Criticism. Vol. 1: Essays, American and English Writers. 1879. Ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 315–474. Kennedy, Sinclair. The Pan-Angles: A Consideration of the Federation of the Seven English-Speaking Nations. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. Keynes, John M. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. New York: Harcourt, 1919. Lawrence, D. H. Fantasia of the Unconscious. 1922. New York: Penguin, 1971. Lawrence, D. H. The Plumed Serpent. 1926. Knoxville, TN: Wordsworth Classics, 1995. Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Colonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. How Natives Think. 1910. Trans. Lilian A. Clare. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lyon, Janet. Manifestos: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Malinowski, Bronislaw. The Sexual Lives of Savages. New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1929. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737–748. Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. 1867. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1992. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s. Trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. New York: Prometheus, 1979. 888–896. Nkosi, Lewis. Home and Exile. London: Longman, 1965. Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Rogers, Gayle. Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Scholes, Robert, and Clifford Wulfman. Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction. Yale: Yale University Press, 2010. Scott, Bonnie K. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Seeley, J. R. The Expansion of England. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883. Seme, Pixley Ka Isaka. “The Regeneration of Africa.” African Affairs 5 (1906): 404–408.

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Spengler, Oswald. Decline of the West. 1918–1922. Trans. Charles F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1939. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. 1889. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Vilakazi, B. W. “The Conception and Development of Poetry in Zulu.” 1938. Foundations of Southern African Oral Literature. Ed. R. H. Kaschula. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1993. 105–134. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Williams, Raymond. “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism.” The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London: Verso, 1989. 37–48. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. 1938. New York: Harcourt, 1966. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. New York: Harcourt, 1981. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt, 1989. Zamora, Lois P., and Wendy P. Faris. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Zwerdling, Alex. Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London. New York: Basic, 1998.

4.2 Further Reading Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Friedman, Susan S. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Wollaeger, Mark, with Matt Eatough, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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