MARINA MACKAY, Modernism and World War II.

Abstract

THE ongoing debates about the historical ends of modernism means that the title of this book immediately promises a productive juxtaposition. If the received critical narrative of European high modernist literary practice locates its key paradigms in the canonical texts of the 1920s, then the catastrophic violence of the mid-century brought about by World War II demands that scholars account for the guises in which modernism persisted beyond its self-proclaimed moment, and for the uses to which its legacy were put. What, we must ask, does Proust's exquisite madeleine give us in the face of mass physical annihilation? What does Finnegans Wake mean in the age of totalitarianism? Many key late modernist figures were very directly caught up in the messy material business of war, some, like Walter Benjamin, asking these types of question themselves. Leaving aside Benjamin's own tragic fate, we may think of the survivors—of Samuel Beckett's and Gertrude Stein's existence in France, of Vladimir Nabokov's eleventh-hour escape from Paris to New York, or of the community of major German cultural figures who fled for California. Modernism and World War II, despite its title, is not concerned with these, but focuses exclusively on British writers, and on how the war inflected their negotiations of national cultural identity. Several—Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West—have long been institutionalized within modernism. Some, such as Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green, bear more complicated relation to its canon. Others, including Angus Wilson, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan, are engaged in retrospective dialogue, both with modernism and the war. W. H. Auden, presumably because of his increasingly internationalist politics, is notably excluded. In this sense, the claims which MacKay makes for modernism and its relationship to World War II need to be assessed within very particular parameters.