Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age, by Vincent Pecora

Abstract

Reviewed by: Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age by Vincent Pecora Bruce Robbins (bio) Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age, by Vincent Pecora; pp. xxxvii + 271. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $93.00, $88.35 ebook. Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age is a bit of a cliffhanger. No one will be surprised to learn that there is a great deal of anti-cosmopolitan sentiment out there, that it expresses itself in the highest of high literature as well as in popular reactionary politics, or that it is associated with land—land where some people feel that they belong in a deep and almost mystical way and that others, as the first group of people are not slow to affirm, emphatically do not belong at all. Anyone who followed the last two presidential elections in the United States will have noticed that urban areas tended to vote Democratic while rural areas tended to embrace the unhinged xenophobia of Donald Trump. Vincent Pecora does not need to be informed about the sins that can be laid to the account of the old throne-and-altar agrarianism or the newer Blut-und-Boden nativism. He commands a wide range of informative examples. A full chapter is devoted to the Nazi theorist Otto Brunner. Pecora does not forget the Palestinian victims of Israeli settler colonialism. Yet this extraordinarily rich and erudite book is enlivened by a certain suspense. The mystery that drives the reader is why, though these well-known materials seem both transparent and uninspiring, the author nevertheless spends so much energy rehearsing them. It is only on the book's last pages that we get a more or less definitive answer. Provisional answers peep out along the way. One is a desire to show that modernist scholars have overestimated the period's proud post-Victorian discovery of homelessness and estrangement. In doing so, they have neglected important continuities between the modernists and the writers of the nineteenth century. Pecora throws off a multitude of enticing instances (the display of scholarly plenitude here is dazzling), but his key exhibits are George Eliot and T. S. Eliot. Another polemical pairing, which links the Nazi theorist Brunner with the postcolonial theorist Ashis Nandy, suggests that Nandy's disavowals of Hindu nationalism cannot protect his celebration of anti-Western Indian traditionalism from the taint of genocidal violence. The case is all the stronger because Pecora, with characteristic scholarly seriousness, takes the trouble to go extra deeply into the Indian epics on which Nandy's argument rests. A third possible motive emerges from the linkage between George Eliot and T. S. Eliot. In both cases, Pecora takes pains to separate the claims of Blut (blood) from those of Boden (land), the first an imaginative claim to (a promised) land rather than an actual experience or memory of belonging to it. He also lays out in generous detail the theological assumptions (up front in T. S. Eliot's case, vestigial in George Eliot's) that in his view underpin and shape those land-based claims. [End Page 142] This sounds like a project of demystification. But if that is what one is expecting, one will be surprised, whether pleasantly or not. About T. S. Eliot, Pecora goes through a sequence of steps (for example, reading "significant soil" as soil in which one's ancestors have been buried, and thus a kind of Incarnation of the Incarnation) in order to arrive at the conclusion that the "pagan agrarianism of [Thomas] Hardy and [D. H.] Lawrence" was "completely inadequate for Eliot's purposes. Only a native regionalism that was bound to a Christian theology, politics, and aesthetics held out any redemptive promise for him" (230). This specification will neither add to nor detract from the well-established distaste for Eliot's reactionary anti-cosmopolitanism. It will seem to justify the scholarly steps needed to reach it only for those whose real concern is with Christianity itself, and perhaps not even for them. The question of scholarly motive also hangs over Pecora's argument that Eliot is less an anti-cosmopolitan than a "perverse" cosmopolitan, meaning that he prized "a wide-ranging intellectual familiarity...