Modernist Aesthetic & Political Realities

In this comprehensive collection on the relationship between modernist aesthetics and the political realities of colonialism, Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses gather an impressive field of critics whose essays delineate the seminal lines of thought on the topic, as well as contribute to a renewed understanding of the political significance of the major modernist figures in the British Isles. Begam and Moses propose to find a critical position between those who view the modernists without regard for their critique of colonialism and those who accuse modernists of implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) reinforcing the ideology of colonial expansion. They also importantly distinguish the volume's use of the term colonialism, an empire's "institution and administration" of power, from imperialism, an empire's establishment of rule "through the application of military conquest or force." I am inclined to find more expedient Frederic Jameson's use of the terms (noted by Begam and Moses), in which colonialism represents only the physical presence of the colonial power in a larger ideological conquest of a colony, but the editors' distinction is logical and consistently applied.

Begam and Moses explain that the dates defined in their subtitle are significant from both an aesthetic and political perspective: 1899 marks the publication of Heart of Darkness and the close of the nineteenth century and 1939 the death of W. B. Yeats and the advent of the Second World War. However, Nicholas Daly's "Popular Literature at the Fin de Siècle" momentarily breaks these chronological parameters in order to draw a connection between the late-nineteenth-century treasure-hunting tales of Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard and the early modernists' quests for a piece of financial success in England's capitalistic market. At times, Daly's metaphorical links between treasure-hunting plots and the search for financial success seem overly constructed (what artist of any genre would not desire monetary recompense?), but his central point that the increasingly capitalistic market in England influenced not only the way texts were marketed but their style and subject is a useful one.

In the following two chapters, Moses and Jed Esty discuss the influence of colonialism on the aesthetics of the modernist novel. In "Disorientalism," Moses convincingly argues that a generation of modernists was conceived from the disruptive psychological effects on the colonialist caused by living on the imperial periphery, and not the alienation and chaos of metropolitan social structures. He cites Marlow's disorienting experience in encountering Kurtz (who undergoes his own radical transformation) and Adela Quested's panic in the Marabar Caves in Forster's A Passage to India as primary examples of this disorientation. He also traces the development of a host of modernist aesthetic techniques to the experience of colonization. Esty argues in "Virginia Woolf's Colony" for a similar relationship between the collapse of the bildungsroman novel and the loss of identity experienced by English adolescents living on the boundaries of empire; he focuses on the death of Rachel Vinrace in Woolf's A Voyage Out. Brian May's "Modernism in A Passage to India" parallels certain aspects of Moses and Esty's conclusions. May argues that while Forster applies many traditional modernist aesthetic elements—particularly impressionism, elementalism, and apocalyptism—he neither embraces nor endorses them as a means to understanding Indian culture. In fact, this very failure underscores the disorientalizing influence Moses believes colonialism had on modernist psychology and aesthetics.

Chapters four and five emphasize how England's national self-perception was altered by colonialism. Andrzej Gasiorek's "'Primitivism,' and the Future of 'the West'" discusses how both D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis determined that Europe's exploding nationalistic movements were destroying the cultural integrity of the continent. In "T. S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence," Vincent Sherry addresses Eliot's reputation as a racist colonialist, owing to his juvenile creation of such unfortunate figures as "King Bolo" and "Apeneck Sweeney." Sherry complicates this too reflexive judgment by arguing that...