Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation (review)

What do the "Time Passes" section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), Walter Benjamin's radio address "The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay" (1932), and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995) have in common? This is one of the many enigmatic questions posed by Lecia Rosenthal's new book, Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation, which grounds its speculative arguments about the problematic relationship of Modernism to the topics of catastrophe and mourning on these three apparently unrelated works. To base an entire book (even a fairly brief one) on the theoretical and affective repercussions of such a slim selection is a risky strategy, and to raise the reader's expectations that this book will make an important claim about Modernism borders on presumption. However, Rosenthal is so imperturbably preoccupied with her meditations on the intellectual framework she is attempting to put into place that the reader quickly forgets about Modernism as a historical period or set of aesthetic strategies, and instead looks (often in vain) for the interpretive payoff that Rosenthal's ponderous, jargon-laden, and allusive style seems to promise.

The disappointing reality is that Rosenthal seems more interested in producing an oblique, self-conscious, melancholy echo of her chosen texts' engagements with catastrophe than with unpacking their particular features or insights. One representative passage occurs in the chapter dealing with Virginia Woolf. Here, Rosenthal quotes a famous excerpt from To the Lighthouse (it begins, "One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness") and ends her chapter with the following commentary (if that's what we should call it) on the passage: "The emphatic turn of the 'but.' The apocalyptic introduced and thwarted. The moment of a 'now' stalled before apocalypse, and all-falling either-or that turns on nothing but a 'feather.' All but for a feather." This inconclusive conclusion to a crucial chapter of her book is more than just a kind of impressionistic academic echolalia; however, it is symptomatic of Rosenthal's refusal to analyze her primary texts except in arbitrary, indirect, and desultory ways. There are also problems with the context in which she treats Woolf's passages: her eccentric treatment of "Time Passes" not only misses the symbolic and stylistic relevance of the passages she cites for Woolf's narrative as a whole, but also fails to attend to the sources of the intellectual drive that inspired Woolf to write such luminous yet in many ways uncharacteristically objective passages. In other words, Rosenthal too often appropriates the texts she purports to explicate, and in so doing vitiates or obscures most of the claims she might make about their historical or aesthetic significance.

It must be said, however, that her contextualization of Benjamin's radio address and Sebald's novel is more careful and illuminating, though since neither of these texts could be said to belong to the familiar Modernist canon, one might argue that she had no choice but to introduce them circumspectly. Unfortunately, even once they have been presented to us in their contexts, neither of these works ever appears as central to Modernism as her book's overarching argument would seem to suggest they ought to be. This leads to a further troubling reflection: one could readily imagine adding dozens of far more representative and significant examples of the Modernist preoccupation with catastrophe and mourning than are treated here, and the fact that Rosenthal ignores so many major figures and features of the period she is supposedly examining is unaccountable. The scanty treatment of Freud, a major Modernist thinker of mourning and catastrophe if ever there was one, is also puzzling.

Ultimately, however, the book's aim seems so far away from any kind of historical or critical analysis that it seems oddly unfair to judge it by those traditional scholarly standards. To require a clear argument or central thesis from it seems naïve, almost vulgar...