Modernism and Mourning (review)

The essays in Modernism and Mourning cover both poetry and prose. Most contributors to this collection concentrate on American and British writers, but one essay turns to Federico Garcia Lorca’s elegies, especially ‘Lament for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,’ which celebrates the demise of a torero. Patricia Rae, in her comprehensive and useful introduction, surveys theoretical models of mourning and melancholia, with particular attention paid to Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Derrida’s articulation of grieving. Rae writes, ‘[T]he modernist works discussed here leave mourning unresolved without endorsing evasion or repression; indeed, they portray the failure to confront or know exactly what has been lost as damaging.’ In a short conclusion, Jahan Ramazani addresses the implications of the essays in terms of ‘resistant mourning,’ meaning the possibility of effecting social change through rituals of remembering.

Modernism and Mourning offers an embarrassment of riches. Mark Whalan’s essay on race and commemoration of the unknown soldier is a searching piece of scholarship. Whalan explains that 200,000 African American soldiers fought in France during the First World War, but not one African American soldier participated in the Allied victory parade on Bastille Day in 1919 in Paris. In a brief and thorough essay, Stacy Gillis discusses the cultural determinants for the golden age of detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Detective fiction typically generates information about corpses, a trope that resonates with the soldiers who never returned from the battlefields of the First World War. Patricia Rae’s essay on pastoral tropes and ‘proleptic mourning’ in 1930s British poetry is a model of carefully researched scholarship. In a different vein, Greg Forter, in an essay about mourning and capitalism in The Great Gatsby, argues that ‘Fitzgerald grasped how the new regime of gender conspired with capitalist modernity to disparage the realms of affective experience and creative expression as feminine.’ Several other essays in this collection, relying on trauma theory, shed light on the issues of responsibility, loss, and forgiveness.

When contributors aim for contemporary relevance, they contradict the modernist focus of the volume. Madelyn Detloff speciously relates Virginia Woolf’s ‘Three Guineas’ and H.D.’s Pilate’s Wife to the events of 9/11. Detloff refers to President Reagan’s funeral procession, the aids pandemic, and Abu Ghraib. There is, or ought to be, a difference between scholarship and op-ed pieces; Detloff’s piece falls into the latter category. Consequently, it fails as either scholarship or criticism. Jill Scott’s essay on H.D.’s The Gift also drifts towards a discussion of 9/11, but pulls up, responsibly, to ‘show the relevance of examining historical responses to trauma and loss.’ There are times and places to talk about 9/11, but those occasions are not in a book about modernism.

Responsible criticism locates cultural artifacts within historical, interpretive paradigms. Some of the most responsible criticism in Modernism and Mourning is the least anticipated. Patricia Rae, for instance, discusses the cancellation of the Remembrance Day ceremonies on 11 November 1939, because remembrance was overshadowed by impending battles of the Second World War, already declared. Stacy Gillis, discussing the persistent myth that the best and brightest British men were killed during the First World War, reminds readers that the number of men between the ages of twenty and forty dropped between 1911 and 1921, but by fewer than fifteen per thousand. While significant, this figure suggests that not all of the best and brightest died. Eve Sorum makes a brilliant connection between the institutionalization of a national ‘moment of silence,’ first practised on 11 November 1919, and the moments of silence in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End.

The essays in Modernism and Mourning are nicely edited and effectively juxtaposed. An implicit argument about musical consolation emerges in Mark Whalan’s and Tanya Dalziell’s invocation of jazz, and Eric Reinholtz’s observation that Lorca, who collaborated with composer Manuel de Falla, was influenced by the dirge tradition of ‘deep song.’ A complementary volume to this fine collection of...