Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-Garde by Elisabeth W. Joyce (review)

Abstract

they certainly saw themselves as importantmembers of the body politic. Carson is perhapsmost illuminatingon Stein, whose economic and political interestshave, as he indicates, been relativelyneglected. However, the readingsof Zukofsky's'A' are also very stimulating, especially where Carson interweaves insights into the poem with an account of US corporate history and an analysis of how the corporation rose to takethe place of the state. This is a demanding but ultimately rewarding book. My main reservation concerns the repeated invocation of Freud's theories on mourning, melancholia, and fetishismasmeans to explainthe relationbetween well-being,loss,and sacrifice. Too often these seem incongruous with identifying the practical effects of macroeconomic forces, although a reasonable case is made for their relevance to Stein. Although some concepts are difficult,thisis a well-writtenbook and a well produced one (I found only one possible misprint). It will be of immense value to anyone interested in the three writers individually and more generally in the politics of modernism. TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN STEPHEN MATTERSON CulturalCritiqueandAbstraction.MarianneMooreand theAvant-garde.By ELISABETH W. JOYCE. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses. I998. 157 pp. ?26. Elisabeth W. Joyce draws on 'the visual arts as an analogy for Moore's poetry in order to uncover the extent of her ambivalence about her own culture' (p. I4), arguing that she used abstraction as an oblique critique of oppressive cultural formations. Thus Moore is compared to Marcel Duchamp in her avant-garde rejection of bourgeois values. This is clearly a differentMarianne Moore from the one raisedin an artsand craftethos who made scrapbooksand whose wide range of aestheticinterestsfrom tapestryto photography has been tracedin such exemplary detail by Linda Leavell in Marianne MooreandtheVisual Arts:Prismatic Color (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, I995). Furthermore,Joyce's approach relies on a distinctionbetween modernist self-reflexivenessand an avantgarde concern with content to which not all readers would subscribe. Her claim that the avant-garde is 'socially invested' (p. 22) whereas modernism is not, is unconvincing, even with the appropriationof Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, CliffordGeertz, andJulia Kristevaas theoreticalback-up. If the overall theoretical apparatus of this study seems, at times, unnecessarily unwieldy, the detailed discussions of the collage poems are thought-provoking. Patientlysourcingthe matrixof quotationof which 'Marriage'consists,Joyce shows how Moore cuts and pastes to make this most familiar of institutions strange, whereas 'An Octopus' is read as an image of the poet herself, 'her long tentacles gathering information from a wide variety of sources' (p. 80). It is easier to agree that 'Marriage'is a critique of the institutionthan it is to interpret'AnOctopus' as transgressivebecause it interpolatesfamilynicknamesinto the American sublime. The fourthchapterproposesan analogybetween thephotomontage techniquesof theDada artist,Hannah Hoch, andMoore'smethod, inpoems suchas 'TheJerboa', of transplanting and reshaping images. Joyce draws attention to the origins of photomontage in the hands of Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann as a politically activist technique to evade the Weimar censors. She argues that Moore, similarly, underminesa scientific,rationalideology by 'pretendingan alliance with it' but, by shiftsof perspective,revealsher disapprovalof bourgeoisculture.The chapterraises importantissues,and one admiresany criticwho wrestleswith 'TheJerboa' line by they certainly saw themselves as importantmembers of the body politic. Carson is perhapsmost illuminatingon Stein, whose economic and political interestshave, as he indicates, been relativelyneglected. However, the readingsof Zukofsky's'A' are also very stimulating, especially where Carson interweaves insights into the poem with an account of US corporate history and an analysis of how the corporation rose to takethe place of the state. This is a demanding but ultimately rewarding book. My main reservation concerns the repeated invocation of Freud's theories on mourning, melancholia, and fetishismasmeans to explainthe relationbetween well-being,loss,and sacrifice. Too often these seem incongruous with identifying the practical effects of macroeconomic forces, although a reasonable case is made for their relevance to Stein. Although some concepts are difficult,thisis a well-writtenbook and a well produced one (I found only one possible misprint). It will be of immense value to anyone interested in the three writers individually and more generally in the politics of modernism. TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN STEPHEN MATTERSON CulturalCritiqueandAbstraction.MarianneMooreand theAvant-garde.By ELISABETH W. JOYCE. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University...