- Modernism and World War II
What happens to national culture when a country wins a war and loses an empire? Marina MacKay's new book Modernism and World War II explores this question by reading literature engaged with, and inflected by, wartime rhetoric and modernist aesthetic. MacKay argues for the necessity of reading late modernist texts alongside their "messily political contexts" (16), [End Page 200] especially Britain's fraught transition from imperial power to emerging welfare state. At a time of national isolation and unity, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, as well as the younger modernists Rebecca West, Henry Green, and Evelyn Waugh, "made the guilty compromise . . . of supporting the war," while creating works incorporating the cultural anxiety of their historical moment (10). This study challenges reductive definitions of modernism as an often "alienated, alienating form of creative production" (20) by looking at the "importance of 1939–45 . . . in the multilateral nature of its modernisms" and "reinstat[ing] the complexity of mid-century British culture" (20–21). Paradoxically, for MacKay, the "Second World War was the really modernist war, since it provoked the widespread critical introspection whose absence in the earlier war had ostensibly made social modernism necessary" (79).
Each chapter focuses on a single author and his or her engagement with the war at a time when modernism as an artistic endeavor was becoming institutionalized. The opening chapter on an already canonized figure reads Woolf's Between the Acts (1941) against its pacifist grain by tracing a change in Woolf's perspective on war while she was working on her last novel. Woolf's "shift to the political centre" and her "participation in what have since become consolatory cultural memories of the war" shortly before her death complicate typical perceptions of Woolf as either apolitical (the old view) or primarily "leftwing radical" (the current critical consensus) (23). Woolf's "war awakening" marks a departure from the "pacifist polemic" of Three Guineas (1938) (30). In MacKay's view, the real possibility of Britain's invasion by the Germans at the time of Woolf's writing partly explains why the relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe is "explicitly imagined as one of attempted invasion or successful conquest" in this elegiac novel (42).
Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) may not strike readers as a prime candidate for inclusion in the modernist canon, however MacKay justifies its presence by suggesting that West uses "high modernist mythmaking" to "defend national identification" as a crucial step to recover a character almost destroyed by imperial occupation (45 and 55). For MacKay, the book "details what a history of occupation has done to the Balkans by way of showing what it might mean for Britain to lose the war" (45). West's sympathetic portrayal of "people of whom we know nothing," as Chamberlain described the victims of Nazism to rationalize appeasement (45), and specifically her use of Muslim Bosnia "to represent imperialism as a cultural catastrophe" (48), traces a potential trajectory from "national identification" to a more inclusive internationalism than the one promoted by left-wing intellectuals from the 1930s (45).
MacKay's politically inflected reading of Eliot's Four Quartets (1935–1942) seeks to ascribe important ideological work to these well-known poems by juxtaposing them with Eliot's wartime propaganda verse such as "Defense of the Islands" and "To the Indians Who Died in Africa." This intertextual dialogue highlights the political and historical "argument about fighting, writing and spiritual struggle" that MacKay finds central in the poems. Eliot, a living canonical figure of 1920s modernism, both indicts his own generation for twenty "largely wasted" interwar years and "valorises modernism's critical and creative procedure rather than its portentous products" (89 and 90).
Unlike Woolf and Eliot, who continue to generate impressive cottage industries in academic circles, Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh remain marginal in master narratives of modernism, and MacKay's attention to their wartime writings rectifies such critical neglect. Green's experimental fiction of political neutrality connects him both to earlier modernists and to...