Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature ed. by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, Robin Hackett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature ed. by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, Robin Hackett Marta Figlerowicz Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, ed. Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019). Pp. 274. $85.00 (cloth). As I read Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, my mind wandered to a 1929 essay by Theodor Adorno. The essay considers the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven and the early compositions of Franz Schubert. Adorno describes the transition between the two composers as follows: He who crosses the threshold between the years of Beethoven’s death and Schubert’s will shiver, like someone emerging into the painfully diaphanous light from a rumbling, newly formed crater frozen in motion, as he becomes aware of skeletal shadows of vegetation among lava shapes in these wide, exposed peaks, and finally catches sight of those clouds drifting near the mountain, yet so high above his head. He steps out from the chasm into the landscape of immense depth bounded by an overwhelming quiet at its horizon, absorbing the light that earlier had been seared by blazing magma.1 A reader of modernist criticism will be instantly familiar with the grand style and chilly backdrop Adorno adopts here. Four years earlier, in his introduction to The New Science (1925), Erich Auerbach imagined a Giambattista Vico who “stands alone in the icy air of a glacier, and above him stretches the immense baroque horizon of the vault of heaven.”2 Ten years earlier still, in The Theory of the Novel (1915), Georg Lukács described how an antiquity “guided by the stars” was superseded by a modern “world abandoned by God,” to whose prayers and hopes the starry sky had cooled.3 Inspiring or perhaps enabling each other, modernism’s literary-critical greats had an infinity of such cold abysses at the ready, holding them out before artists and writers to echo their solitude, futility, and belatedness, but also the enormous latent force of their feelings. Such passages spring to mind when reading Affective Materialities for two reasons. First, they illustrate a thesis that forms the volume’s [End Page 185] through line. For all of modernism’s suspicion of sentiment and emotion, the authors argue, their writings brim with affects understood as more impersonal psychic and bodily forces. But modernists find affects in unexpected, counterintuitive contexts in which one would not have expected them to emerge or linger. Barren like crystals, ruins, corpses, and moonscapes, these contexts testify to affect’s survival beyond, and independence of, the fixtures of subjectivity. Present-day lovers of such counterintuitive affective sites will be pleased by this volume’s themes and approaches. From Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts’s introductory essay on ether, through Karen Guendel’s reflections on flesh and granite and William Kupinse’s on “cold crystal,” the essays weave together some of the most radically anti-humanist strands of affect theory and new materialism. They also show that these late twentieth-century theoretical standpoints describe modernist aesthetic attitudes very well. Each chapter focuses on one or two major writers: T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and others. Most are Anglophone, the rare exception being Kathryn Van Wert’s discussion of Rainer Maria Rilke. Monophone as it is, the volume does not feel provincial. Its philosophical and political aims are broad and the range of topics on which it touches—from ecology to queer theory—is considerable. In the concluding essay, Robin Hackett movingly brings the volume’s concerns into the present moment. She applies its methods to the racism and queerphobia that subtend the architectural and affective politics of gender segregation in twenty-first century America—and powerfully condemns the ways in which emotions, as opposed to affects, bolster these harmful social patterns. “[E]motion produces the others of racist seclusion” in the “circumstances” Hackett describes; “[b]lank affect, alternately, produces access” to shared social spaces by challenging and partly neutralizing the normative categories that emotions reinforce (249–250). The second tie that links Adorno’s, Auerbach’s, and Lukács’s icy landscapes to Affective Materialities is...