The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Susan M. Marren

Reviewed by

Susan M. Marren University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

A decade ago, Houston A. Baker, Jr., famously noted that even the most sympathetic chroniclers of the Harlem Renaissance have frequently labeled the period a failure when considering whether it produced "vital original, effective or 'modern' art." The reason for the resoundingly negative assessment, Baker argued, was that the reigning critical paradigm derived from so-called high modernism, which bears no "family" resemblance to "modern Afro-American sound," which is "a function of a specifically Afro-American discursive practice." Baker offered in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) an alternative approach commensurate to the distinctive character of Afro-American expressive culture and its unique history. Since then, a number of studies have emerged that take issue with the ethnic absolutism of such approaches as Baker's, seeking instead to discover how Zora Neale Hurston's "crayon enlargements of life" might teach us about T. S. Eliot's "Shakespeherian Rag."

Michael North's insightful, intelligently argued book The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature is one such study. It explores the relation between black and white modernisms, identifying in these works aesthetic (and political) strategies, many of which recall Baker's brilliant "mastery of form" and "deformation of mastery." Taking stock of white and black modernists' "different stakes in the same language," North argues persuasively that "it is impossible to understand either modernism without reference to the other, without reference to the language they so uncomfortably shared, and to the political and cultural forces that were constricting that language at the very moment modern writers of both races were attempting in dramatically different ways to free it."

North takes a fairly familiar idea - that dialect as a literary form felt liberating to white writers but imprisoning to black - and presses upon it until it reveals broader and deeper implications than were apparent before. He tells the fascinating story of the myriad ways in which white writers modernized themselves by acting black; Pound, Eliot, Stein, Conrad, and Williams strove, he argues, to make modernism into dialect in order to challenge the Anglophilia of their elders. North's investigation of the vital part that racial masking played in the development of modernism exposes the unsavory connections between Anglo Modernism and the imperialism with which it coincided historically. As he points out, following Sara Suleri, European notions of other continents have wavered between the "linked opposites of identity and difference"; "assimilation of the other has no alternative but blank incomprehension." Imperialism could not be justified if the colonial subject could not be articulated as either completely assimilable or completely other. In the imperialist moment it was nearly inevitable that white modernists would choose black dialect and the African mask as signs of their rebellion against the standard English of their elders, and it was also inevitable that this masquerade would replicate the imperialist objectification of the racial alien. In this inhospitable context, North argues, black writers such as Hurston, Toomer, and McKay, trapped by dialect, struggled to make of it a modernism, to use the disjunctive rhythms of dialect to create a modern art.

North unfolds this argument in three sections. The first explores the ironies of the triangular relationship between standardization, dialect, and aesthetic modernism. At the same time that the standard-language movement began to thrive (the 1880s), he points out, so did dialect literature. By 1920, dialect had become solidly established in its equivocal role: On the one hand, it served as the corrupt opposite of "pure" English and, on the other, bewilderingly, as its "natural" form. The second section of the study treats modern expatriates, who share with one another an acute sense of linguistic and cultural disaffinity with their native lands and, born of that sense, an awareness of the "condition of spiritual truancy" in which language exists. The third section deals with American modernists who were not expatriates, but who felt similar linguistic pressures because they insisted on embracing a "plain American" language at this time of "linguistic Anglophilia."

Both black and white writers are discussed in each section of The Dialect of Modernism, yielding some unusual and revealing comparisons, as when Jean Toomer and William Carlos Williams both prove "Strangers in the American Language." North joins a whole wave of critics working on this period who seek to discover how race is a generative category for aesthetic modernism, black and white. The same Oxford University Press series that has published North's book issued Laura Doyle's Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture (1994), a study of the formative influence of nineteenth-century notions of racial patriarchy on modern fiction. Walter Benn Michaels has produced a densely argued and illuminating study entitled Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1996), which argues that the artistic movement of American modernism and the social movement of nativism shared in the 1920s a common purpose: to forge a racially pure American identity. But North's effort may have most in common with Paul Gilroy's insistently transcultural The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Indeed, one of the most resonant images in The Dialect of Modernism recalls what Gilroy terms his study's "central organizing symbol": the ship at sea. For both North and Gilroy, the ship under sail captures the spirit of intellectual, geographic, and linguistic mobility characteristic of modernity as their studies imagine it. In The Black Atlantic, the image of the ship calls to mind the history of (forced and voluntary) migrations and the circulation of ideas, activists, and "key cultural and political artefacts" through the Atlantic region. Out of this ferment, vibrant Black Atlantic modernity emerges. In North's rich discussion of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" early in The Dialect of: Modernism, the figure of the ship gives rise to a sparkling reflection on the condition of linguistic displacement so commonly shared among modernist writers,' white and black. According to North, The Narcissus is for Conrad a mobile, polyglot linguistic community in which language properly belongs only to "linguisters," castaways whose position between the cultures they translate gives them insight into the infinite fungibility of language. But at the same time, North notes, Conrad's ship is a metaphorical England, which will be safe only when racial aliens have been thrown overboard.