Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern

College Literature, Spring 2001 by Nowlin, Michael

Reading 1922 should solidify Michael North's reputation as one of today's most learned, engaging, and insightful students of modernism. The author of studies of Yeats and Pound as well as the groundbreaking work The Dialect of Modernism (1994), North turns his attention here to a crucial year in the history of modernism. He aims to recover the complexity of the cultural moment epitomized by 1922 from the cultural amnesia fostered, on the one hand, by decades of formalist criticism and, on the other, by a postmodernist reaction to the modernism reified by that criticism. Far from being the product of an elite group of geniuses creating an esoteric, autonomous "art" that would resist commodification and contamination from the forces of mass culture, modernist literature was profoundly implicated in the commodification of culture newly energized by the mass media (radio, film, the dailies and slick magazines), as well as in a dawning era of globalization whose implications affect us today. In effect, North argues, modernism signalled the birth of the principal issues that have been used to define so-called "post" modernism. Critically astute and lucidly written, Reading 1922 will have a significant impact on our understanding of modernism as we move into the twenty-first century.

Those with a basic knowledge of modernism will recognize 1922 as the publication year of Anglo-American modernist touchstones:James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. They may also recognize it as the year in which The Great Gatsby is set-the definitive year of "the jazz age" in Scott Fitzgerald's view. And though Willa Cather's novel One of Ours won the Pulitzer Prize that year, she was clearly stung by Edmund Wilson's unfavorable comparison of her work to Ulysses, which seemed once and for all to place her on the wrong side of the line separating "the old" from "the new." There are several good reasons to mark 1922 as a banner year in literary history, including the publication of the first works associated with the "Harlem Renaissance," but what of other fields? Here North's flare for inter-disciplinary research yields fascinating connections. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which many regard as marking the "linguistic turn" critical to twentieth-century philosophy, was published in this year. So were Bronsilaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific and A.R. Radcliffe Brown's The Andaman Islanders, which would steer the discipline of anthropology away from the white supremacist, evolutionary cultural ideologies informing the ethnography of the past. Gilbert Seldes, who was instrumental in getting The Waste Land published and publicized, conceived of the project that became The Seven Lively Arts, arguably the first extensive study of popular culture, in a year that saw several pop-cultural texts testifying to the displacement of traditional notions of the self that the new media were bringing about. And it was the year that Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, who was to have an enormous influence on the art of advertising, coined the term "public relations." 1922 also witnessed the birth of the Irish Free State and the granting of Egyptian self-determination-two indications that the British Empire was beginning to unravel--as well as the rise of Fascism in Italy and the emergence of the United States as the world's principal naval power. These are but some of the facts that North connects in provocative and fruitfully disorienting ways. In his words, "the difficulty of making such connections is getting them to stop somewhere-and it soon becomes clear, after concerted study of a very concentrated time span, that this is what conventional disciplinary boundaries are for. They filter out the noise, so that the seemingly irrelevant fact that [C.K.] Ogden was involved in a distant way with African American literature cannot trouble accounts of his dealings with Wittgenstein. In protecting us from such irrelevance, however, disciplinary boundaries also impoverish our sense of a period, and this seems to be an especially acute problem when it comes to relations between literary modernism and other aspects of modern culture" (9).

Disorientation is in fact central to the modernist experience of modernity, and thus one of the dominant themes of North's book. Its most obvious manifestation is the global mobility that links massive patterns of emigration with, for example, the globetrotting of field anthropologists and the ex-patriatism of artists. This important motif is carried over from The Dialect of Modernism: North is particularly interested in "foreigners" (Conrad, Malinowski, Wittgenstein, even Eliot) drawn to cultural centers or those who find themselves permanently displaced from "home" (Claude McKay, D.H. Lawrence, or even Charlie Chaplin, whose 1921 autobiography was titled My Life Abroad). But improving upon a theme elaborated to some extent by Raymond Williams, North insists that one did not have to go abroad to feel disoriented in 1922: as Chaplin discovered when he confronted the ubiquity of his own screen persona, as converts to psychoanalysis discovered in their own psyches, as American racist demagogues were discovering in the legions of foreigners transforming American cities, and as liberal and conservative moralists were discovering in their attacks on the new mass media, the world was becoming a very strange place. North argues convincingly that modernism, rather than postmodernism, apprehended the breakdown of self-identical communities, self-identical subjects, and a unified notion of truth, a breakdown compensated for by the community afforded by mass media and the reign of circulating, mechanically reproducible representations.