The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry by Edward Marx

Abstract

MLR, I0 I .2, 2006 527 However much memory may circulate around this book, though, itsmain concerns seem to me to be quite different. First, its concentration is powerfully on James as a writer who took both prose and novelistic representation to breaking-point. Righter was clearly motivated by an extensive, admirable, and identifying love of James and this charged relationship animates and motivates all of his work. It spurs on some very insightful commentary on the operation of power in The Golden Bowl as 'made palatable by the subtlety of its application' (p. I40). It also motivates one of the book's most enjoyable, breezy, and discursively adventurous chapters, 'In the Museum', which intriguingly connects The Outcry, how James combined his love forHenrik Andersen with awell-considered disdain forAndersen's projects, and the austere hostility which, for Righter, marks the planned museum culture to which Adam and Charlotte are exiled at the end of The Golden Bowl. Although Ipersonally disagree with Righter's dismissal of the novel version of The Outcry as 'unpalatable' (p. I82), his linkage of it to the Ververs and his decision to quote James writing: 'I live myself in the very intensity of reality and can only conceive of any art-work as producing itself piece by piece and touch by touch' add up to a deeply admirable act of literary and cultural critique and celebration (p. I86). Although Righter's reader might long for more detail, more quotation, and more argumentative solidity, the organization of each part of the book, a structure which invites the reader to revisit the volume's three different foci again and again so that reading American Memory in Henry James becomes an act of continual re-remembering, is structurally appropriate and convincing. But in that structure of remembrance what is returned to is not, Iwould contend, memory but an attributed ambition on James's part to reconcile profoundly formative and utterly antagonistic opposites-Europe and America (at least as both are outlined by Righter), capital and human possibility, senses of community and the sheer eclectic weight of populations. Righter's James tries, in The American Scene, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, not only to negotiate these contradictions but also, first, to represent them and, second, to allow that will to represent to determine the generic features and departures of his own writing. Capturing such a dizzy set of ambitions in the space of a critical book and attempting also to intervene in their execution constitutes, to my mind, the agenda of Righter's work much more than memory, however much memory may-admirably and lovingly-encircle and motivate this book's own life. UNIVERSITYOFLEEDS DENIS FLANNERY The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism inModern Poetry. By EDWARDMARX. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2004. ?32. ISBN o-8020-879-9. Edward Marx's 'Modern' incorporates both the canonical high modernist Americans (Pound, Eliot, Stevens) and several less influential Britons from the early twentieth century (Flecker, Kipling, Brooke) as ameans of thinking about some of the ways in which constructions of modernity were inflected by the colonial and the non western. So we have a series of linked essays devoted to each of these writers in turn, interspersed with considerations of Violet Nicholson, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore, and the work of the Harlem Renaissance, and spread across infusions from Arabia, Afghanistan, India, the Pacific Islands, China, and American nativism (in both itsRed and Black forms) in order to understand modernism's 'cross-culturalism' through the tropes of the exotic and the primitive, negotiated as projections of the irrational and the unconscious. Marx's premiss is the conjunction of formative mo dernism with imperialist ambition, maintaining that 'themost visible link between 528 Reviews poetry and the world of empire may be found in modern poets' fascination with non-western cultures' (p. 4). From this, we might anticipate a thoroughly historicist, even materialist, account, but Marx turns instead to psychoanalysis (to Freud, and to Jung and Lacan in particular) as a favoured critical armoury, casting himself in 'the position of the analyst attempting to discover themeanings of the primitive and exotic as symptoms of repression inmodern poets and their...