Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Leo Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+245.

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewReading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture. Leo Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+245.Kristin BluemelKristin BluemelMonmouth University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe subtitle of Leo Mellor’s book Reading the Ruins, like all subtitles, operates according to a logic of proximity: modernism is somehow linked to bombsites, which are somehow linked to British culture. To understand how to read the ruins, we have to answer questions generated by those somehows. And we must seek these answers in chapters that, in Mellor’s words, “allow the centrality of modernism to wartime culture…to reveal how much of postwar culture relied upon such an inheritance for definition, even when overtly in reaction or opposition to fragments, debris and the charms of the ruin” (3). Despite Mellor’s claims in his book’s introduction that he uses “the renewed and complicating study of modernism, with its ability to assign signification to the fragmentation of form and content” as the “the intellectual motor” of his research (4), he is too happy relying upon close readings to present a coherent account of the relations between modernism, bombsites, and British culture. It is as if, having committed himself to organizing his book around the metaphor of the fragment, Mellor himself has been reduced to writing fragments, binding together chapters that offer insightful and nuanced interpretations of texts but do not add up to a book.What is missing from Reading the Ruins is theory: a theory of ruins, of periodization, of culture, of modernism, of language and language’s relation to war and the world. Above all, what’s missing is a theory of gender. As cause or consequence of its author’s declining to articulate a theory of gender (including gender’s relation to sex, sexuality, class, genre, and culture), Reading the Ruins does not engage with some of the most important literary and historical scholarship on World War II that has emerged over the past twenty years. Groundbreaking studies on World War II literature by such feminist critics as Gill Plain, Jenny Hartley, Karen Schneider, Phyllis Lassner, and Elizabeth Maslen, which long ago decentered modernism within the dominant narrative of mid-twentieth-century British literature, receive no mention.1 Mellor also neglects to mention more recent revisionary studies by Victoria Stewart and Kristine A. Miller.2 What motivates such neglect of the claims of feminist accounts of British literature and culture influenced by World War II? One can speculate, but ultimately it all comes down to the same thing: a refusal to engage with the diverse and inconvenient demands of a growing field of study.Mellor’s inattention to Miller’s study British Literature of the Blitz is the most egregious of his critical omissions, because Miller deals with many of the same primary and secondary materials that concern him. Published in 2009, two years before his own study, Miller’s study should have been available to Mellor (he does engage with Patrick Deer’s Culture in Camouflage, published the same year as Miller’s).3 Both Mellor and Miller place literature of the Blitz and the bombsite at the center of their studies and at the center of twentieth-century British cultural history. But only Miller explains how this literature is related to modernism. Earlier studies such as those by Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge addressed the gap between modernist studies and literary studies of World War II by situating the writing they defined as modernist or late modernist within the social and political forces of World War II.4 In contrast, Miller argues that “since so many civilians endured home-front violence, representations of the Blitz occur not just among a modernist elite but at all levels of culture” (23). Noting how thoroughly this Blitz literature engages with “realistic material detail,” Miller allies it with the nineteenth-century realistic novel, precisely the literary genre and style against which elite modernists defined their experimental, allusive efforts. In other words, while Miller’s Blitz literature might look very similar to Mellor’s bombsite literature to someone skimming their books’ respective indexes, Miller’s is theorized in cultural and materialist terms that oppose it to modernism. Of course, there are ways Mellor could contest such a claim, starting with the observation that Miller does not examine poetry, but the point is that he does not try. If he had, perhaps he could more successfully have proposed a countertheory explaining how exactly he wants to ally modernism with the diverse kinds of literature—“inconsequential” to “canonical” (7)—that he associates with bombings, bombsites, and ruins. As it is, Mellor’s key term, “fragment,” expands according to a logic of infinite metaphorical substitution: modernism is fragmentary, bombs create fragments, images can be fragments, poetry contains images, these images can be violent, bombings are violent, and so forth. Certainly it is fair to ask, Are all ruins necessarily fragments? When is a fragment not a ruin? When is a fragment not modernist?To readers not burdened by a sense of responsibility to existing criticism or readers who do not chafe at Mellor’s assumption of a singular literary culture and a singular bomb culture in London and Britain (or, rather, London as Britain), Reading the Ruins does offer rewards. Its interpretation of Rose Macaulay’s World My Wilderness (1950), in a chapter titled “The New London Jungle,” is one of the most intelligent pieces of criticism ever written about any World War II text. This reading supports Mellor’s claims of modernism’s proleptic, prewar pressures upon wartime imaginings of the fragmented city through analysis of Macaulay’s dependence on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). And Mellor’s third chapter, “Surrealism and the Bombsites,” amounting to nearly 25 percent of his entire study, is convincing too, because it rests on evidence of direct influences between what we recognize to be the modernist aesthetic of 1930s London-based surrealism and related forms of wartime cultural productions, including those by J. F. Hendry, the artist Graham Sutherland, and the photographer Lee Miller. The other chapters—the first, on prewar imaginings by writers such as H. G. Wells, Shaw Desmond, and George Barker of the “ruination of the city” (11); the second, on what amounts to the theme of fire in works by, among others, William Sansom, Louis MacNeice, and Henry Green; and the fourth, on the “aesthetic possibilities of the supernatural” in the context of home-front bombings experienced by Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and David Jones (139)—offer close readings often of lesser-known texts that we must, after Mellor, take into account in our conversations about Second World War literature.We are still left with the question of what makes writers of so many lesser-known texts “key figures in British Second World War culture” (93). Mellor’s list of “key” or “major figures” (48) sprawls from William le Queux and Clough Williams-Ellis to Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, H. D., and T. S. Eliot, to Lynette Roberts, Humphrey Jennings, and John Wyndham. The work of explaining the assumptions that guide Mellor’s classification of writers, and the ways in which the writers respond to modernism and relate to diverse British home-front cultures, remains to be done.Notes1 See, e.g., Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); Jenny Hartley, Millions like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (London: Virago, 1997); Karen Schneider, Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Phyllis Lassner, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own (London: Macmillan, 1998); and Elizabeth Maslen, Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928–1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).2 See Victoria Stewart, Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Kristine A. Miller, British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Alexandra Harris’s study Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists, and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010) was published one year before Mellor’s and was probably unavailable to him for consultation, but it should be included in any bibliography of important recent studies challenging Mellor’s assumptions about the shape and influence of modernism on British arts and letters through the 1940s.3 See Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009).4 See Marina MacKay, Modernism and World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 2November 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/682130 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.