Make It Modern

Aarthi Vadde's Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914–2016 grafts its signature terms together to reconsider the phenomenon known as high modernism, deftly anatomized through a reading of James Joyce, as part and parcel of an always already anticolonial, globally connected, and formally heterogeneous mode. Modernism's long reach encompasses Rabindranath Tagore's early twentieth-century auto-translated poetry and prose, Claude McKay and George Lamming's national-diasporic novels of black America and black Britain, Michael Ondaatje's Sri Lankan and North American landscapes of history, myth, memory, and legend, and Zadie Smith's multiracial postcolonial London. The chimera, a category whose hybrid coupling allows it to “at once delimit the possible and exceed it” (2), serves as a cipher for what Vadde takes as modernism's signature blending of politics and aesthetics. Each of the writers examined, though separated by period and geography, is shown to draw from a constant yet changing repertoire of modernist strategies against the backdrop of a world regularly punctuated by colonial and contemporary inequality, human migration, and national-global aspirations of belonging. Beneath various impulses toward collectivity, Vadde finds a chimeric, alchemic mix of “illegibilities, distortions, and affective conflicts” (7). Read as the formal index to larger geopolitical attachments and solidarities, these flickering forms bring to light a modernism long and still shaped by the political imaginary of internationalism.Modernism's salience, for Vadde as for generations of critics, turns on its imbrication of politics and aesthetics. Against the straw figure of modernism's “exclusive politics of literariness” (15) Vadde's careful readings reveal a complex web in which entanglements of mode (realism, modernism), language (standard English, demotic, dialect, untranslatables), and figurative strategies (parataxis, variegated scales, mythmaking, and mythbusting) map the formal imaginary of transnational, international, and global politics. These terms are distinguished and historicized in the readings that make up the book, even as Vadde also draws connections among them. Resisting the tendency to sequentialize modernism, postcolonialism, and globalization, Vadde instead seeks to open various “analytical apertures” through which a larger “chimeric tradition of internationalism” emerges (21, 39).The book introduces this tradition with an exploration of how Tagore's auto-translations of Nationalism and Home and the World showcase the originals not as autonomous wholes to be exactly replicated but rather, “strategically reproducible and changeable repositories of material (‘common-wealths’) whose translation and reconfiguration brought cryptic allusion, assemblage, and collage into his Anglophone writings” (40). In a meditation on temporality that runs throughout the book, Vadde returns to Tagore's distinction between translation as replica and translation as reflection to suggest that if replication entails seriality, reflection marks “an encounter between the present moment and the ghostly past moment that it conjures up and reshapes” (55). In this spectral form, Tagore's auto-translations showcase the chimeric possibilities of modernism's encounter with historical periodization. Like time and language, both of which emerge as sites for recombinatory transformation, nationalism is also subject to torqueing. Vadde reveals the oft-opposed “cosmopolitan Tagore” and “patriotic Tagore” (the former English-language and the latter Bengali-language) to be more complexly situated—“his innovative approach to what are usually considered second-order acts of literary production (compilation, translation, and editing) multiplies the number and scale of collectivities to which he belonged, rather than reducing them to simply the world or the nation” (41). This situation of modernist internationalism's form and politics in the space of the in-between and the beyond recurs as Vadde turns from translation politics to representations of national identity in Joyce's master modernism.Vadde coins the term alternating asymmetry to describe the affective and symbolic oscillations (pathos/bathos, grotesque/divine) that structure Joyce's work and in which she finds a formal index to intercalations of national and international solidarities. Alternating asymmetry foregrounds perceptual particularity in relation to external realities while also shifting among “incompatible orders of storytelling” (97), including first-person narrator observation, parodies of public speech and writing, and renditions of legal, religious, folk, and street talk. In preserving incommensurability between these diverse elements, alternating asymmetry “works against transforming cultural practices into the countable attributes of a nation” (97). Short pieces like “After the Rose” and major works like Dubliners and Ulysses are keenly interpreted as part of an archive of national unbecoming. If parallelism views (a subset of) nations as internally homogeneous units whose distinction derives from their symmetries with other nations, alternating asymmetry is less centripetal and more shaped by the provincializing that Dipesh Chakrabarty invokes in mapping modernity beyond Europe. Particularly striking is Vadde's excavation of a rhetoric of temporality in which the paralytic slowness of the everyday that haunts Joyce's fiction not only expresses the decalage between metropolitan speed and colonial stasis but undoes it. Asymmetrical connection points back to, and beyond, uneven development. This aspect of Joyce's modernism, like that associated with Joseph Conrad, allows us to read more deeply within Anglo-modernism so as to extend beyond it, thus discerning postcolonial continuities with earlier figures who were at once of empire and against it. Once again taking up the in-between, the both/and, and the beyond, Vadde goes on to read a similar possibility in the epiphanies for which Dubliners is known. As examples of chimeric form, the epiphanies are both enabling and disabling of the central Joycean myths of nation, religion, language, and art. It is as a strictly formal brief against the autonomy of art that Vadde reads Dubliners' epiphanies—“sacraliz[ing] profane material rather than purifying it through aesthetic form” (91). Positioning the aesthetic as a vehicle for political critique allows Vadde to connect early modernists such as Tagore and Joyce to a later, antiracist and anticolonial modernist tradition.Turning first to Claude McKay and George Lamming, Vadde situates their early and mid-twentieth-century Caribbean diasporic nationalisms against a contemporary landscape of migration, refugee crises, and nonterritorial concepts of citizenship. The past-present political connection, so central to Chimeras of Form, here allows for a rich excavation of the prose of vagabondage (McKay) and emigration (Lamming) as central modes of a global modernism that takes “nomadic collectivism” (112) rather than international individualism as its hallmark. Focusing on McKay's and Lamming's “stories without plots,” Vadde shows how the rights-bearing, nation-representing subject of the nineteenth-century European bildungsroman gives way to a collective subject shaped by such institutions of modernity as cross-border labor, commerce, and culture. Banjo's description of jazz yields a rich account of the “desire of the vagabond subject,” a desire “without limit and without achievement” in contrast to the bourgeois “rational-critical subject motivated by the pursuit of an object” (133). Working at the crossroads of ideology critique of the novel, diaspora, black, and postcolonial studies, and global modernism, Vadde here delivers on Chimera of Form's promise to resituate the novelistic genre's world-building and world-linking capacities in relation to a world that is neither abstract, universal, nor only Euro-globalized. Here, as in previous discussions of Tagore and Joyce, language is a closely considered site in which bursts of syntactical and orthographical innovation, as much as nonlinear narration and the broken time of non-expectant waiting, produce literary vagabondage.The next chapter turns to Ondaatje's use of bordercrossing “mythistory” as a genre with which to negotiate a new aesthetics of the archive, in which the necessarily fragmentary and partial records of the colonial and postcolonial past are yoked together across and beyond single national traditions. The chapter focuses on Billy the Kid and Anil's Ghost, the former a fictionalized record of the American Wild West legend and the latter a meditation on the Sri Lankan civil war focused on the limits of reconstruction, forensic and historical, for the work of reconciliation. Vadde shows how the fragmentary yet endlessly incorporative form of both texts allows the archive's own intractable forms of loss to multiply, proliferate, and thus suture together a larger transnational post-atrocity memory culture. Drawing on models of comparative and multidirectional memory, the chapter deftly sutures a reading of Ondaatje's particular variant of modernist internationalism to subtle considerations of justice and reconciliation, the status of the human, and the shape of the historical and, to use a term from Anil's Ghost, the “unhistorical” past. World literature models of deep time also inform Vadde's elegant analysis of the oscillating scales of time and hybrid mix of genres that Ondaatje uses to wrench potent national symbols, like Billy the Kid or the stone Buddhas and artifactual bones that fill Anil's Ghost, into emblems capable of linking multiple groups across the “diffuse networks of global collectivity” (151). By showing “what national pasts might look like when formulated through foreign countries” (181), Ondaatje's novels illustrate the intercalated scales of belonging that Chimeras of Form deems central to modernist internationalism.The final chapter takes up Zadie Smith's postmodernist, yet for Vadde also deeply modernist, depiction of postwar-to-contemporary northwest London. Taking the figure of the root canal, popularized in Smith's White Teeth as a network of the geohistorical connection of British persons through colonialism, Vadde extends the metaphor to Smith's larger commitment to “portray the global whole as relational” (186). Integral to this project, as previously to Ondaatje's, is the attempt to show the partiality of that whole, its constitution through perspectival particularities, demotic idioms, and sliding scales of time. One consequence is, similar to Ondaatje, a dismantling of the myth of the autonomous subject of liberal individualism and the scrambling of hallowed codes of Englishness (the rural, the local) into a cognitive remapping of a metropolis made by the “elsewhere” of its former colonies. Smith's “nimble localism,” in White Teeth, the novella The Embassy of Cambodia, and NW, is realized through such traditional modernist strategies as syntactic decomposition, parataxis, impressionism, and more (205). Beyond this, Vadde deftly detects an aesthetic that paradoxically embraces both partiality and fullness, the latter an effect of the intense saturation of Smith's descriptive language and the scale of her big novels. Scale is of particular importance to Vadde as an index to the geographical, historical, linguistic, and conceptual oscillations that here, as throughout Chimeras of Form, effect the recombinant transformation of established narratives of identity and affiliation.With its argument for the necessity of “diverse ontologies of time” (174), so as to make visible and possible such political horizons as nonnormative citizenship, cross-group belonging, and non-isolationist national cultures, Chimeras of Form adds an important voice of sharply contemporary political consciousness and century-spanning formal nuance to the study of modernist internationalism. Both broad and deep, critically synthetic and analytically precise, Vadde's book provides a rich conceptual blueprint for the vital project of what the epilogue calls “communal cohesion beyond identitarian claims” (220). The chimeric possibilities of form itself as retort and resistance to what she calls, citing Wendy Brown, “the fortress state's despotic forms of ‘intact nationhood’” remain to be traced well beyond the scope of Vadde's subtly forceful, wide-ranging, and world-expanding book. With conscience and conviction, Vadde has given us a valuable index of how literary-historical terms such as modernism, when stretched, unsettled, and grafted, can themselves make history for the future

Aesthetics · Art · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Studies and Diaspora