Modernism Without the Modernists: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels

Abstract

Modernism without the Modernists: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels Marjorie Perloff (bio) The thesis of Walter Benn Michaels’s Our Americacould hardly be clearer or more forcefully argued. It goes like this. Whereas “the major writers of the Progressive period—London, Dreiser, Wharton—were comparatively indifferent to questions of both racial and national identity” (OA,8), the literature of the postwar, of the 1920s, is characterized by its particular brand of nativism,that is, its commitment to the notion that one’s identity is defined by racial difference. Whereas the Progressivists believed in the fabled melting pot, in the possibility of wholesale assimilation into U. S. citizenry, the pluralist 1920s, substituting a faith in difference for one in the superiority of any one group, wanted to preserve racial purity at all costs. Accordingly, identity comes to be defined by one’s difference from “them”—from those whose blood might contaminate one’s own. The fear of miscegenation and of the reproductive family now become powerful; “the homosexual family and the incestuous family thus emerge as parallel technologies in the effort to prevent half-breeds” (OA,49). Michaels exemplifies this thesis with literally dozens of examples, primarily from the fiction of the period. In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,Quentin Compson’s desire to convince others that he has committed incest with his sister Caddy is an “attempt through language to substitute the blood ties of family for the affective and/or legal ties of love and marriage.” (OA,5) In this respect, Quentin and Jason are really not all that different; both believe, in their own way, that “blood is blood” (OA,3). Or again, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,Tom Buchanan’s aversion to Gatsby has less to do with [End Page 99] class than with race. For who is Gatsby? Is he perhaps a Jew, hanging out as he does with the likes of Meyer Wolfsheim? In any case, he is not “one of us,” any more than is Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises.But then that novel’s hero, Jake Barnes, functions as Cohn’s alter ego: Jake’s war wound, which has left him impotent, Michaels argues, is again an emblem of the nativist fear of the reproductive family. In staying single, Jake preserves his racial identity. And so on. From Willa Cather’s The Professor’s Houseto Nella Larsen’s Passingand Quicksand,from Jean Toomer’s Caneto Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven,nativism is the engine that drives human behavior, and in the 1920s, nativism depends first and last on understanding one’s Americanness as racial difference. In Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy,for example, Slim Girl’s “genealogical ambition is to have children who are ‘all Navajo’” (OA,71), even as Nella Larsen’s Clare learns that “passing” destroys the purity of her own identity. One must be true to one’s racial self. Pluralism thus turns out to be the bogey. Whereas Progressivist “claims to racial superiority inevitably involved the appeal to standards that were understood as common to all races. . . . the pluralist can prefer his own race only on the grounds that it is his” (OA,137). The commitment to pluralism is the commitment to the “primacy of identity” (OA,140), and thus to what Michaels calls “identity essentialism” (OA,140). Indeed, “there can be no coherent anti-essentialist account of race” (OA,134). For “the particular contribution of pluralism to racism is to make racial identity into its own justification” (OA,137). And when that happens—as is, according to Michaels, the cultural condition today—racism prevails. But why did this form of nativism occur in the 1920s and recur in the 1990s? What about the six decades in between? And why should miscegenation be such a taboo if the racial Other is considered not inferior but merely different, as Michaels claims? These issues are avoided by a curious sleight-of-hand. The inevitable reductionism of Michaels’s project (the discussion of Gatsby,for example, must play down the role of Nick Carraway so as to foreground Tom Buchanan’s fears) is acknowledged and declared necessary...