The Hybrid Matrix of Modernism: Bloomsbury and the (Chinese) Crescent Moon Group

Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China. Patricia Laurence. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xxvi + 488. $59.95 (cloth).

It is no exaggeration to say that British modernism would not have been the same without the contrapuntal contribution of Asia. Without Asia's influence, we would not have had such modernist masterpieces as E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," or some of W. B. Yeats's great poems and his Noh-style plays. It is also no exaggeration to say that, despite Asia's crucial role in the formation and development of British modernism, the fascinating relationship of the two still remains peripheral in mainstream accounts of British literary history as evidenced by the fact that these authors' encounters with Asia have not yet gained sufficient attention of literary historians, critics, and biographers. Keenly aware of the state of the art and diligently seeking to improve it, Patricia Laurence argues in Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China that a global approach to the study of modernism is necessary. Her book examines Britain's influence on Chinese modernism and, reciprocally, China's influence on British modernism; her chief goal is to create "an international map of modernism," because for her, modernism in Britain and China did not evolve locally, but internationally through a relationship of "interdependency" (29). Clearly, for a scholar of British modernism to draw such an international map is a formidable challenge: the project requires the author to gain familiarity with Chinese culture, literature, history, and language. As Laurence indicates in her introduction, she spent two years learning Chinese, took courses in modern Chinese literature, made several research trips to China, and interviewed Chinese scholars, investing linguistically and culturally in order to undertake her project beyond her academic training and cultural horizon. As a native speaker of Chinese who works in the field of twentieth-century British Literature, I was at times pleasantly surprised by Laurence's substantial knowledge of Chinese culture and her acute understanding of the formation and development of Chinese modernism.

Insofar as her endeavor to globalize modernist studies is concerned, Laurence can be seen as joining the recent trend to push modernism out of its usual comfort zones into new terrains of global connections. Within this trend, we have seen Aldous Huxley: Between East and West edited by C. C. Barfoot (2001), The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Stevens, and Moore by Zhaoming Qian (2003), and Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, and Tel quel by Eric Hayot (2004). International in scope, the three books shed light on Asia's vital role in shaping the modernisms of Pound, Huxley, and Brecht, though they do not trace these authors' reciprocal impact on the Asian cultures that influenced them. Moving Asia to the center of modernist studies, Laurence joins these authors in expanding the hegemonic character Edward Said assigned to Orientalism, though he clearly revised it himself after the publication of Orientalism (1978), by revealing Orientalism's multi-faceted complexity and ambivalence. Regarding modernism's relation to the Orient, Fredric Jameson's influential essay "Modernism and Imperialism," in which he suggests that "the structure of imperialism also makes its mark on the inner forms and structures of what new mutations in literary and artistic language to which the term modernism is loosely applied," announces modernism's guilty complicity with European colonialism and has been widely hailed and quoted.¹ It is, therefore, thought-provoking to see these scholars align modernism not with clear-cut imperialism but with a multitude of cultural discourses, of which some are clearly anti-imperialist. At the same time, Laurence goes a step further to examine the interdependency between Chinese modernism and British modernism through a close examination of the exchanges between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group. Her global approach, which draws on...