Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel

Introduction

Introduction At first glance, the central contention of this book might seem uncomplicated: that the Windrush novelists, West Indians living and publishing in London after World War II, emerged into prominence via an overt affiliation with literary modernism.1 Indeed, as this book hopes to show in the pages that follow , when these influential Anglophone Caribbean novels are read within the historical and geographical context of their production, their affiliation with modernism becomes not simply evident but indispensable to an understanding of their complex literary-political aims. However straightforward it appears , though, such an assertion quickly becomes entangled in a constellation of literary-critical discourses—modernist, postcolonial, Caribbean—that have divergent, often antagonistic conceptions of both the nature and the function of their respective critical protocols, as well as the literature to which these protocols are applied. Part of the aim of this book, therefore, beyond merely illustrating how these foundational (and clearly anticolonial) West Indian novels developed through a relation to British modernism, is to model a critical framework that recognizes the mutually reinforcing interconnection between these apparently discrete literary (and literary-critical) phenomena. In excavating the convergences between West Indian novels and their modernist predecessors , that is, I hope to illustrate how the prominent postwar emergence of Anglophone Caribbean literature is best understood as a process unfolding —alongside and in contention with the legacies of modernism—within a transnational literary space.2 Of course, to lay claim to the term modernism is, from the outset, to 2 MIGRANT MODERNISM invite disagreement from one’s scholarly peers. Modernism, as Astradur Eysteinsson has observed,is a “highly troublesome signifier”(Concept of Modernism , 6), troublesome not least because of the chaotic variety of aesthetic movements, styles, and philosophies that have operated under its mantle. A further,equally vexing difficulty is involved in assigning either a period of time or a geographical area to which its production can usefully, let alone authoritatively , be limited. The title of Peter Nicholls’s 1995 study—Modernisms: A Literary Guide—suggests with eloquent concision the irreducible multiplicity one must confront in navigating the tangled terrain of what we call modernist literature.In his preface,Nicholls positions the book against what he identifies as a prevailing critical tendency to reduce the complexities of modernism to caricature, to “a sort of monolithic ideological formation” (vii) used largely as a foil for postmodernism. Nicholls’s self-consciously internecine critical foray, then, highlights a third factor complicating any effort at definitively characterizing literary modernism—the markedly variable history of the meanings that critics themselves have attached to this aesthetic phenomenon.As Eysteinsson has also emphasized,the critical concept of modernism has altered continually over time, taking on different values and characteristics as different comparative and historical frames are employed in its analysis.3 For this book, an illuminating index of modernism’s taxonomical shiftiness can be descried in the space between two similarly titled critical attempts to evaluate literary modernism—Harry Levin’s 1960 Massachusetts Review article , “What Was Modernism?,” and Maurice Beebe’s 1974 introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Modern Literature, “What Modernism Was.” Beebe’s piece begins with explicit reference to the “provocative essay by Harry Levin” (1065), but as his titular modification suggests, Beebe is much more certain of his answers. His article defines modernism in precisely the way that Nicholls subsequently reproves: as a one-dimensional backdrop against which postmodernism can be seen, much to the latter’s advantage. Beebe characterizes modernism as “detached and aloof” (1076), dismissing it as an arid, solipsistic, form-obsessed practice and opposing it to a valorized “Post-Modernist literature which will reflect a more democratic and popular view of literature” (1078). Such views, especially given the time period in which they are advanced, are hardly surprising. Of more interest here is the fact that Beebe’s article engages so minimally with its alluded-to predecessor. Beyond its initial acknowledgment that the question posed by Levin’s title is worth asking, Beebe’s article never refers back to its critical namesake, and Introduction 3 indeed, the modernism that Levin actually describes in his article is radically different from that which Beebe sees a short fourteen years later. In his use of the past-tense “was,” Levin certainly signals his sense that modernism has been superseded, but unlike Beebe’s, his attitude to this decline is one of wistful regret. For Levin, the imminent demise of...