Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (review)

Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. By Michael North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. vii + 269 pp.

We have had books about 1926, 1819, and no doubt other specific years that I'm not familiar with. ¹ Now Michael North has tackled 1922, often seen as the annus mirabilis of modern literature, the year when Ulysses and "The Waste Land" were first published. In his preface North explains that he tried to turn himself into the ideal reader of 1922, to immerse himself in the flood of texts that appeared in that year without prejudging what was valuable, useful, or important. The point of this exercise was to provide a dramatically enlarged context for the study of modern literature. A thorough knowledge of modern culture would allow a better understanding of the masterpieces of literary modernism.

Yet North's view of the relative importance of text and context seems to have changed as he wrote. Joyce and Eliot make minor and not very memorable appearances. Instead, other facets of modern culture move to center stage and become valuable. North, like the famous modernists he invokes, records the strangeness of everyday life in the modern world. Rather than provide a mere backdrop or foil to the great modernist texts, he claims, the culture of 1922 was saturated with the qualities--irony, ambiguity, and self-reflexivity--often seen as distinctively literary. "It may be a certain self-conscious formalism," he concludes, "that most closely links modernist literary works with modern society" (210).

One of North's goals is to debunk clichés about the autonomy and elitism of modernism. He suggests that much of the blame lies with scholars of postmodernism, who like to contrast the cultural eclecticism and pluralism of the present to the "great divide" that once separated modern art from mass culture. Instead, North shows that avant-garde art and modern culture were intricately bound together. Not only were the great works of modernism embedded in consumer culture, technology, and the like, but many everyday texts of modern life reveal the tensions and contradictions of modernity as powerfully as the works of the literary avant-garde. To live in 1922 was already to inhabit a highly aestheticized world.

Several recurring ideas help tie together North's wide-ranging analysis of English and American modernity. One is mediation as an inescapable fact of modern life, that is, experience as filtered through representation. This idea, suggests North, was already a commonplace in 1922, not just for an intellectual elite but for a broader public acutely aware that popular media such as film were changing everyday perceptions of identity and reality. The modern sense of ironic distancing, the ability to see one's own way of life as contingent, was intensified by the spatial dynamics of the modern. The impact of globalization was felt in many arenas, from anthropology to art to shopping. Rather than simply embody a single universalizing logic, modernity also led to a sense of the multiple and incompatible nature of different viewpoints, making it possible to imagine the strangeness of one's own life when viewed by another. The logic of universalism and relativism, North points out, are closely interconnected.

Finally, the disorienting qualities of modern life were accentuated by complex experiences of time. On the one hand, modernist art and popular culture were seen as epitomizing the shock of the new, as offering an impudent challenge to the cultural hierarchies of the past. The pace of change was dramatic and unsettling. On the other hand, the supposedly postmodern questioning of progress, newness, and linear time was already well established in 1922. The blurring of temporalities and citation of past styles was evident not only in "The Waste Land" but also in the craze for Egyptian handbags inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb. "The status of modernity itself," North writes, "had already been rendered ambiguous...