Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (review)

Although the last decade has witnessed a great revival of interest in the term "cosmopolitan" as a possible successor to an exhausted multiculturalism and its reliance on identity, the term still carries a good deal of baggage, above all, its connotations of elitism, even decadence. In this shrewdly conceived, well-informed, and well-executed study, Rebecca Walkowitz meets this challenge head-on: she manages to give aesthetic weight to the cosmopolitan as a style, tactic, and posture of irreverence and "perversity" that ruptures good taste and literary convention, while also reading this boundary breaking as enacting political critique (18, 13). "Antiheroic impulses," in her words, "help to shape alternative modes of political consciousness" not founded on the brute imperatives of efficiency and instrumental reason (104). So James Joyce, for instance, critiques British nationalism and Irish nativism by rejecting their commitment to a "system of manners" reliant on "cheerful decorum"; instead, he invents "a literary style that purposefully gives offense" (14). One might add that by the late sixties, Philip Roth, a perverse cosmopolitan novelist well-versed in Joyce, would borrow Joyce's strategies to unsettle WASP seriousness and Jewish piety, two pillars of the genteel regime that ruled the literary establishment.

Not only does Walkowitz make a refreshing escape from the received wisdom that assumes the cosmopolitan is apolitical, but she also retires the predictable modern/postmodern periodization by bringing together three canonical modernists—Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf—and three contemporary and problematically "British" novelists from multiple locations—Ishiguro, Rushdie and Sebald. She places all six under a theoretical rubric she calls "critical cosmopolitanism." Skeptical of heroic models of exile and displacement, of political engagement and progress, ambivalent about collective social projects, and suspicious of "epistemological privilege" (31, 2, 4), these writers cultivate an "ethos of uncertainty, hesitation, and even wit that is sometimes at odds with political action and with the interventionist paradigms of critical theory" (5). They employ, according to Walkowitz, a "double consciousness" of restless self-reflection that includes "reflection upon reflection" and the "critique of critique," ideas Walkowitz derives from the Frankfurt School, particularly Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (3). About the former she is so enthusiastic that at one point she speaks of Sebald's "Horkheimian gaze" as a corrective to the emphasis on Benjamin's influence upon the novelist (158). But it is Adorno, along with de Certeau, Barthes, and Deleuze, who are the main tutelary spirits here. She has chosen wisely: each in his distinct way discourages simple understandings of the political and its relation to the literary and likewise encourages subtle senses of resistance found both in the everyday and in the commitment to aesthetic difficulty. These thinkers sponsor Walkowitz's willingness to understand cosmopolitanism "not simply as a model of community but as a model of perversity, in the senses of obstinacy, indirection, immorality, and attitude" (13). Accordingly, she regards cosmopolitan style as emphasizing the "ability to see and think mistakenly, irreverently, trivially, and momentarily over the necessity to see and think correctly or judgmentally" (18).

Because her stance, as nourished by these thinkers, is premised on the beliefs that dissenting thought is a precondition for social change, social norms are embedded in literary style, and homogenous writing helps produce a homogenous culture. Cosmopolitan Style has the signal virtue of thinking the aesthetic and political together (84). This is especially welcome as a way to conceptualize the cosmopolitan, for it moves discussion beyond reflex suspicions about elitism, touristic slumming, political aloofness, and aestheticist withdrawal. Walkowitz's "perverse" sense of the term makes the cosmopolitan not a refuge from the political or historical (as if either option was ever possible) but rather the enactment of "new conceptions of national culture and international belonging require new social attitudes about authenticity, patriotism, and moral correctness" (14).

For each of her six novelists, Walkowitz identifies a key perverse "tactic" that in separate chapters she skillfully explicates: Conrad uses "naturalness"; Joyce uses "triviality"; Woolf "evasion"; Ishiguro "treason"; Rushdie "mix...