Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History by Gayle Rogers (review)

Every month, it seems, new research projects in modernist studies blow open the frames not just of the Anglo-American core canon but of the high European-isms and avant-gardes that once defined the map of experimental writing between 1900 and 1950. Recent books like Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough’s Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms have delivered international modernist studies for the twenty-first century, with essays ranging from Turkey and Japan to Cuba and Vietnam, and covering not just fresh national territories but also fresh regions (Balkans), ethnicities (Berbers), and languages (Yiddish).¹ Still, some of the most nuanced challenges to the older disciplinary geographies of west-and-rest have come from scholars overhauling European studies from within, using concepts such as the semi-peripheral and the semi-colonial (the latter including, of course, the superb collection Semicolonial Joyce²). Into this mix comes Gayle Rogers’s Modernism and the New Spain, a remarkably accomplished first book that builds on those models and indeed extends them with great methodological finesse.

Rogers takes a somewhat familiar chapter of interwar literary history—the traffic between antifascist English writers and the Spanish Civil War—and embeds it into a much deeper and ideologically surprising narrative of cultural exchange and revival, one that requires an expert’s grasp of Silver-Age Spanish letters and that includes James Joyce as an iconic figure of literary modernity in a distinctly European, rather than narrowly Irish, vein. Rogers’s interest in José Ortega y Gasset as a representative intellectual in the New Spain after 1898 puts one in mind of several comparable cases—towering writers who redefined their own local and national literary cultures by affiliating themselves with cosmopolitan traditions: Henrik Ibsen in Norway, Hugh MacDiarmid in Scotland, T. S. Eliot in England, Joyce in Ireland. With the last case in mind, Rogers develops a useful account of the ways in which both Irish and Spanish culture “trouble Eurocentric center/periphery … models” (67). But this is only one angle of approach to Joyce in the book. We also find a thoughtful historicization of imperial decline as a context for British modernism, for which Ireland and Spain serve equally, if asymmetrically, as troubling reference points—the one a monitory precursor for Britain’s own diminishing hegemony, the other an insurgent hotspot of anticolonial ferment. In addition to surveying these paired contexts through the figure of Joyce, Rogers offers a comprehensive and skillful textual account of Molly Bloom’s Iberian roots in the Gibraltarian backstory of Ulysses.

But what will be most exciting to JJQ readers about Modernism and the New Spain is the new light it sheds on Joyce’s Spanish reception, especially in the critical reckoning of Antonio Marichalar, whose startling, witty 1924 essay “James Joyce in His Labyrinth” appears in the book as an appendix, newly translated by Rogers (209-20).³ The essay provides immediate interest both as a historical document and as a lively, probing criticism. Marichalar was deeply curious about the purpose and provenance of Joyce’s mature style, and this propels his essay into a striking account of Joycean wordplay as at once funnier and more profound than the verbal shock tactics of Dada/Surrealism. Rogers wisely follows Marichalar closely as the latter drills down into the punning lexical roots of Ulysses which, appearing from the standpoint of 1924, anticipate the full weight of the Wake’s radical multiculturalism. Insisting as it does on the anthropological bases of Joyce’s ludic art of combination, Marichalar’s essay could be understood as a Spanish counterpart to Eliot’s more famous take on the mythic method.⁴ This critical correspondence makes sense since, as Rogers’s densely thatched history of modernist journals indicates, Eliot and Marichalar (with Ortega) formed part of the same critical network linked in the 1920s by the overlapping mandates of the Criterion and the Revista de Occidente.

With its networked...