Among the Very Best Studies of Modernism

IF IT TAKES A VILLAGE to raise a child, what sort of collectivity does it take to produce a scholarly book? Tense Future prompts the question because of the abundant, not to say astounding, number of its acknowledgments, ranging from fellowships at the national level (the author thanks three and gives the names of over sixty individuals) and at the department or institutional level (a fellowship as well as two study groups; nearly another sixty people named) to the less formally structured friendship and hospitality of over fifty scholars at other institutions, plus various influential others—undergraduate teachers, colleagues at home and abroad, university press readers—who chatted about or read portions of the manuscript (nearly forty named individuals), a few more whose help was unusually significant, and finally family, including in-laws and grandparents as well as parents. No wonder the idea of “encyclopedia form” appears as part of the subtitle.

Plenty of wonder, however, that Tense Future is so scintillating, provocative, even brilliant—not at all smothered by its indebtedness but instead stimulated, not to say strengthened by it. A carefully orchestrated series of six chapters is fairly bursting with ambitious discussions of such subjects as trauma theory, queer studies, and modernism both “weak” and “strong.” You can of course profitably read this book as an example of more or less standard literary criticism, in which, say, the ambiguity of the airplane in Mrs. Dalloway is treated. (Tense Future is yet another study in which Woolf occupies a fully argued central position in the modernist canon.) And what might be at stake in the attempt of Parade’s End “to fuse the combatant with the noncombatant at the level of mental experience rather than to connect them”? (Ford’s tetralogy assumes a status it never had a generation ago.) But Tense Future is not a formalist study as much as a far more vast, intricately conceived historico-theoretical meditation in which the writing of the R.A.F. officer and air-war prophet I. E. O. Charleton or Hilary Jenkinson’s study of World War I, Manual for Archive Administration, begs equal intellectual or imaginative weight as the above sovereign literary modernists in order to understand the encompassing phenomenon of “total war.”

It is crucial to understand what Saint-Amour means and does not mean by the idea of total war. In part he would indicate the whole imagination of organized, state-sponsored violence after World War I—how on the one hand this violence can be historically demarcated (hence chapters on Woolf, Joyce and Ford) and yet how on the other hand the scale, depth, and range of such violence appear never to have ended and instead to have provided the basis for, say, our subsequent perceptual antimonies themselves (a suggestive aside considers space and time through the example of drones) in what the book terms throughout as “our perpetual interwar.” “Violence for now,” the author concludes, “is constant; only war is intermittent.” How did the geopolitical spectacle of violence—its policies, its scenarios, its asymmetries—come to be manifest in this way? That is, how did what is even conventionally understood as “interwar” come about? In Saint-Amour’s reading Gravity’s Rainbow is eventually presented as arguably the great testament to interwar, not as a period term but as a temporal marker always already decoupled from its historical determinants and now (as we read earlier) ceaselessly felt as “a traumatizing expectation not just of disaster but also of a trackless aftermath in which there will be no mourning, no remembering, no working through.”

We do, however, have as a civilization at least two symbolic orderings to try to keep track, not to say resist, the wholesale destructive consequences of total war: the archive and the encyclopedia. But the former lacks the “intentional form” of the latter. The materials of an archive merely accumulate whereas those of the encyclopedia are “purpose-built.” In the central chapter of the book, “Encyclopedic Modernism...