After the Animal Fable: Creaturely Ciphers in transition

Abstract

Cathryn Setz's Primordial Modernism. animals, ideas, transition (1927-1938) is one of the best books on the "animal turn" in modernist literature and the arts. Its focus is Eugene Jolas's transition (Paris and New York, 1927-1938), the most important international journal of the interwar avant-garde. In four chapters the author traces and illuminates the significance of primordial animal images in works of the French surrealists, of James Joyce, Gottfried Benn and Jolas himself, showing how figures of the creaturely are at the core of these writers' imagination. After the long tradition of the animal fable, in avant-garde modernism animal images have turned into ciphers of writing. By contrast, George Bataille's contemporaneous journal Documents (1938/1939) sees base "amoebic" forms as beyond signs, the formless beyond representation. Setz thereby reviews Jolas's overall project as a singular, if somewhat problematic romantic attempt to assimilate the primordial image in an idealist synthesis of the avant-garde's transatlantic Revolution of the Word.