Modernism, Empire, World Literature

“Ever westward the course of empire.” Bishop George Berkeley’s world-encompassing maxim has had its day—as has Berkeley himself—but it did for a spell help to define the contours of an idea that empire and power never rest, always searching for pastures and victims new. Yet Berkeley’s shorthand for the course of human history has always been precisely wrong, since it gives no account of what forces drive that westward movement, from Greece to Rome to Britain, and so on.It is not Joe Cleary’s job, in Modernism, Empire, World Literature, to fill in the gaps in Berkeley’s blinkered vision, even as he at times invokes Berkeley. However, in Cleary’s account of the westward-shifting centers of Anglophone literary and cultural power from the late nineteenth century on, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Berkeley’s tectonic argument is being systematically investigated. Cleary outlines power transfers in the Anglophone literary world from English to Irish to American and Caribbean literature, charting a long and complex interchange between modernism’s innovations, political power, and institutionalization. Change in the world literary system is driven, Cleary’s work proves, not only by such seismic events as two world wars that rearranged the political and economic power centers of the world, but also by forces within the literary system itself. It is the work of this book to identify the latter, as “peripheral cultures and their emissaries” disputed “a declining centre’s consecrating authority” (47).Cleary’s work has for some time been in conversation with Pascale Casanova’s La république mondiale des lettres (1999; The World Republic of Letters, 2004), and this latest book is his most comprehensive response to date to Casanova’s work. With none of what he correctly identifies as the anxieties of Casanova’s position—as she laments the decline and fall of Paris as a literary center in the twentieth century—Cleary offers a bracing account of the routes of cultural power over the last century and a half, as it is wrested from Paris and London by Dublin, New York, and Castries, St. Lucia. Not that the line of descent is so clearly linear or unidirectional, nor indeed so easily won—the jagged ways that center and periphery overlap, compete, subsume, energize, and enervate each other are at the heart of the argument.The beginning of the book sets out an unusual starting point, as well as unique intentions and methods: Alexis de Tocqueville and Matthew Arnold are the guiding lights of this study. Both sketch out from the center a theory of the cultural periphery as either weakened or vibrant or both, but in all cases impeded by democracy or by the supposed Celtic character. In the face of these theories of structural inadequacy emerge spirited formal responses over the next decades, which we now recognize under the sign of modernism. In chapters on Yeats and Pound, Joyce, Henry James and T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O’Neill, as well as Derek Walcott, Cleary traces a canonical series of disputes over greatness, epic form, peripheral emergence, and much more. Writers from Ireland and the United States challenge London and Paris as the tastemakers of the literary system, with the United States itself during the Cold War becoming a new hegemonic cultural metropolis, its literature making an uneasy bargain with economics and politics in upholding a new center of global power.One of the many highlights of this book is the analysis of the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses on which many an undergraduate reading odyssey has foundered. In a rich chapter that moves from a discussion of the Irish and German Shakespeares of the nineteenth century to Stephen’s reading of Shakespeare as inseparable from the politics of violence at the heart of empire, Cleary makes a compelling case for the centrality of “Scylla” as the scene of Joycean and Irish rivalries, which are both prosecuted and lampooned. In this skillful reading of the episode, Cleary pitches Joyce as an astute critic of “the vicissitudes of mimetic rivalry” (158). Joyce’s careful theorization of influence and rejection emerges as more nuanced and convincing than either Harold Bloom’s or René Girard’s, but also as fatally wrapped up in the rivalries that pattern the world literary system. The claim might seem overblown when summarized in this way, but this is a thoroughly convincing reading of the episode, which makes “Scylla and Charybdis” a clearer object for the study of mimetic rivalry than “Oxen of the Sun,” for example—the parade of literary styles and periods in “Oxen” feels thinly parodic by contrast. While some of this ground has already been covered by Andrew Gibson and others, Cleary’s genius is to make this not an interpersonal act of revenge on Joyce’s part, but a cog in the machine that manufactured a new world literary system.At moments like this, when he binds together formal and historical analysis, we see the payoff of Cleary’s sweeping arguments about competition and emergence over the course of a century. And moments like this are everywhere in Modernism, Empire, and World Literature, arresting the reader with fine-grained readings of Henry James’ The Golden Bowl or Walcott’s Omeros. When Cleary argues that The Waste Land is not an epic of European decline, condemned to mirror only “breakdown and desolation,” but an index of the emergence of a new American century, we get a sense of the tectonic shifts involved in his argument. The poem’s “reconstructive will to salvage and shore up what is broken,” and its accumulative form, are attuned more to the success of Eliot himself and of his natal country in setting the agenda for a political and aesthetic future (128). A combination of “acute crisis and increasingly confident ambition” (131) is what gives the poem its unique swagger, almost as if it were “breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land.”Cleary treads carefully through all of this, seeking to define a series of historical changes, marked by belatedness, resistance, and emergence, without wading in the murky waters of stageist theories of history. His is a discontinuous dialectic. In this sense, the argument here is again much more fine-grained than Casanova’s or many other theorists of the world literary system. At the same time, the prose is spiky throughout, filled with cutting phrases and sharp observations that make the book a pleasure to read. Cleary’s ability to sum up entire literary movements with a mot juste is impressive: “The attempts by Yeats, Synge and others to steep Irish literature in English in the vats of Irish mythology . . . were never more than compensatory gestures of differentiation” (154–55). At another point, Cleary writes that the end of World War I was “a moment when American innocence ended and consciousness of its corruptibility could no longer be averted” (213). The point is not perhaps groundbreaking, but expressed with such clarity and urgency that it has the force of a thing always known but never fully expressed.The chapter on Walcott, coming at the end of the book, points the way to further study, as the westward march takes a swerve toward the South. What other locations, the reader is likely to ask, might we add to the list? What if we were to place Lagos, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Bogotá alongside Castries, and also search out less iconic names in order the investigate the continuing unfolding of the decline and rise of empire? That work is outside the scope of Cleary’s inquiry in this volume, but it is constantly lurking in the shadows of a study that sticks close to canonical authors. So too is the relation between the publishing industry, the literary marketplace, and the business of canonization that consumes so many of Cleary’s writers. Of course we can’t think about Eliot, Pound, Yeats, or Walcott apart from their connections to printing and publishing and anointing, but otherwise this argument does invite extension by scholars in the field of book history, for whom questions such as literary booms, for what they are worth, are more closely tied to the rise and fall of publication figures than to authors’ dreams of rivalry and success. This is one of a number of ways in which investment in the third term in the book’s title, “world literature,” feels somewhat less robust than it does for its first two terms. World literature here is very much viewed within a Casanovan frame rather than interrogated according to wider arguments in the current field, and the exclusive focus on Anglophone literature produces a narrow bank of evidence from which to make an argument about world literature conceived in relation to comparative literature, for example.The story of Modernism, Empire, and World Literature fits in some ways neatly into the transnational turn in modernist studies, now well over a decade old, but the version that unfolds here is both new and definitive. Whereas the transnational turn frequently trades in the language of solidarity and collaboration, there is very little of that to be seen in Cleary’s book, which traces a Saidian relationship between modernism and imperial power, read more as an expression of the capitalist world system than, as Said did, as a set of relationships between metropole and overseas colonies. The watchwords of the argument are rise, fall, decline, emergence, competition, and rivalry. Authors, forms, and ideas in this story only get transported overseas through a process of struggle—a manifestation at the scale of the writer of global processes of capital formation

Ancient history · Art · Empire · Literature · Modernism (music · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies