1913: The Cradle of Modernism by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Abstract

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1101 Leibniz, Jean Baptiste Rene Robinet, Bichat, and SirWilliam Lawrence, among others. In the second part Koelb approaches theways inwhich a dead past can affect the living present by examining Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Keats's Endymion (1817), Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), and Gautiers Spirite (1865). In Part m of his analysis Koelb focuses on 'the interaction ofmatter and spirit as a process of incarnation inwhich bodies take on the character of texts and texts the characters of bodies' (p. 12). Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810), Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and various tales by Poe are offered as evidence of the demonic underside of a resurrection of the fleshand a death thatbrings one into life' (p. 145). Koelb's engaging thesis argues for an original connection between theApostle Paul and 'theRomantic century, but itisat times tenuous and even overstated.With regard to an age of revolution, one also questions the veracity ofKoelb's claim that 'thepolitical history of the time [...] had primarily indirect effectson thematters re levant' tohis enquiry (p. xi). However, in a study that admits topresenting a 'sample' that is 'not meant tobe exhaustive but rather illustrative' (ibid.), his selective analysis suggests an interesting currentwithin Romantic thought, prose, and poetry. University of Warwick Brian Haman 1913' The Cradle ofModernism. By Jean-Michel Rabate. Oxford: Blackwell. 2007. viii+246 pp. ?50 (pbk ?19.99). ISBN 978-1-4051-5117-7 (pbk 978 1-4051-6192-3). 1913 takes itsplace in a series of studies thatdissect cultural modernism by taking one year for an analytic snapshot. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Harrison's 1910: The Emancipation ofDissonance, Michael North's Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, and Marc Manganaro's Culture, 1922. As Rabate notes, his own chosen annus mirahilis has had its fair share of attention, with books by Frederic Morton and Virginia Cowles, and the weighty three-volume collection of essays edited by Liliane Brion-Guerry {VAnnee 1913: lesformes esthetiques de Vceuvred'art a la veille de lapremiere guerre mondiale). But Rabate's principal model is inmany ways Marjorie Perloff's magisterial The FuturistMoment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and theLanguage ofRupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), which takes the avant-garde preoccupation with techniques of'simultaneity as a spur to itsown presentation of themultiple currents converging in the vortex of avant-guerre European modernism. Like Perloff, Rabate wears his formidable scholarship lightly,and the pleasure to be gained from reading 1913 derives from the admirable fluencywith which different and sometimes unexpected strands of this protean cultural moment arewoven together. Of the many writers discussed here, it is perhaps Fernando Pessoa who best exemplifies in this pivotal year 'the difficult birth ofmodernism' (p. 204) as he looks for 'ways to combine his new-found ventriloquism with movements likeneo classicism, late Romanticism, Whitmanian lyricism, paganism, and modernism' 1102 Reviews (p. 155). In 1913 history ison the turn and itsactors are caught looking both back ward and forward, as thatmelange of tendencies indicates. Modernism emerges here as a volatile swirl of traditional and modern pieties in a world that finds itself'increasingly interconnected' (p. 11) but that also sees cosmopolitan values yielding increasingly to aggressive forms of nationalism. The year 1913 may mark 'the inception of ourmodern period of globalization' (p. 1), but it witnesses too the persistence ofRomantic fascinations, most damagingly in themystique ofwar and violence (as Rabate notes, artists such as Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska went towar because theywanted to?'All three could have easily avoided the draft, for reasons of nationality [...] or distance' (p. 208)). This 'emergentmodernism' made its own contribution to the belligerence of 1913, then?'the modern spirit appears as vivisective', Rabate accurately observes (p. 141)?and for that reason ithas undoubtedly brought us 'bad luck', as 1913 an nounces at the outset. Indeed, the curious fusion of the atavistic and thedefinitively new that underlies this early modernism and that is so distinctively announced in Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (premiered that year) fostered occultism and superstition at the very same time as itmystified the technologies of...