Man from Babel (review)

Man from Babel. Eugene Jolas. Edited by Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. xxix + 326. $30.00 (cloth).

Eugene Jolas figures in the history of modernism as the editor of transition, the Paris-based literary journal in which significant portions of finnegans wake appeared long before the full publication of 1939. Jolas left extensive drafts of a memoir in his papers, now in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Andreas Kramer and Rainer Rumold have edited a rich and readable version of the Jolas memoir that presents a panoramic view of the modernist experience from the early years of the century through the outbreak of the cold war.

Jolas was born in New Jersey in 1894 to immigrant parents who, however, soon returned with their son to their native Lorraine. Before the outbreak of World War I, Jolas himself came back to the United States, and his subsequent trajectory repeats this crisscrossing of the Atlantic. Indeed, his life is marked by a double liminality: he participates in the intellectual life of the German-French borderlands of Alsace-Lorraine, and he is a constant mediator between American and European literary cultures. His own poems, some of which are interspersed throughout the volume, were written in German, French, and English; hence the title of the volume. Yet this multilingualism is not merely a biographical fact but, for Jolas, at the very core of the modernist project. In contrast to the late-twentieth-century, postmodern academic critics who tend to dismiss modernism as fully indebted to conventional narratives of progress, this volume conveys the excitement and enthusiasm of the era, its experimentation with language, and its challenge to parochial nationalism. This is refreshing reading.

While it provides fascinating detail, especially regarding expatriate culture in interwar Paris, the fundamental account of modernism raises core questions without resolving them. Perhaps this is in the nature of the topic--modernism and its contradictions--or it may be due to the memoir genre, which slips easily into anecdote rather than reflection. In any case, Jolas's version highlights several questions, the first of which involves the relation of modernism to romanticism. Recalling his arrival in New York, he writes, "That night I saw New York from the roof of the skyscraper, and I reacted to its modernistic beauty with romantic emotion" (18). The memoir leaves the nature of the resonance between the two movements, one of 1800, the other of 1900, deeply ambiguous. At times, Jolas casts modernism as the antithesis of all the nineteenth-century expectations of romantic taste, while at others modernism appears to be the legitimate heir, perhaps the culmination, of romanticism. He is even prepared to subsume the various modernist movements, expressionism, dada, and surrealism, under the banner of a "pan-romantic battle" (97).

Jolas makes it quite clear that he cherished a romantic literary canon, especially a German romanticism, which inspired his early poetry and helped him interpret the mythopoetic aspects of modernism. This surely speaks for the continuity between the two movements. Yet he would also read the catastrophe of National Socialism as an expression of an overly romantic German culture. By 1945, he was forced to recognize the political risks in his canon:

I found a definite predilection among the Romantics for the totalitarian state, for anti-Semitism and for the same sort of Pan-Germanic dementia which had recently encouraged practically the entire nation to undertake the conquest of Europe. . . . In their writings one could also detect a high idealism which had nothing whatever to do with the militaristic cruelty of the succeeding generations caught up in the cult of Blut und Boden. But the seed of German belief in German superiority had undoubtedly been sown a century before [231-2].

Yet if romanticism can engender National socialism, what of its connection to modernism? Jolas takes note of the turn to the Right in writers such as Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, but they...