A New Genealogy of Modernism

ELT 41 : 3 1998 Ceylon serving the empire; Vanessa Bell was having babies; Keynes was preparing a memorandum on Chinese currency. Stansky gives Fry his due, acknowledging what few have—that he was the most important British art critic of the century. He explores Fry's personal tragedy, the loss of his wife, Helen, to mental illness, as a turning point in his career as he moved from being a rather traditional critic to promote avant-garde continental art. Virginia Woolf paying homage to Fry in 1935 said: The names of Cézanne and Gauguin, of Matisse and Picasso, suddenly became as hotly debated, as violently defended as the names—shall we say? of ... Hitler, or Lloyd George__Pictures have never gone back to their wall. They are no longer silent, decorous and dull. They are things we live with, and laugh at, and discuss. And I think I am right in saying that it was Roger Fry more than anybody who brought this change. Interestingly, Stansky argues (like Christopher Reed in A Roger Fry Reader) that "the great strength and weakness of England is the domestication of the extreme." Because there is a tradition of most artists in England coming from the middle class—as opposed to France, Italy or America where artists are "outsiders"—the "rebellions" of Bloomsbury, according to Stansky, are "muted" in English society. It is part of his aim to present the furor of the year 1910 with all of the public outcries against the "barbarous," "monstrous" and "decadent" art of the PostImpressionist Exhibition, Oscar Wilde's play, Salome, and Stravinsky's ballet, Firebird, so that we can hear again the rebellion in the beginnings of twentieth-century modernism. Patricia Laurence ________________ City College of New York A New Genealogy of Modernism William R. Everdell. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xi + 501 pp. $29.95 BECAUSE "DEEPENING DIVISIONS between the 'disciplines' have made it difficult for academics in one of them to feel competent to write about others," William Everdell maintains, "a full history of Modernism , including all the arts and sciences, has never before been written ." In fact, the impression of intensifying Balkanization conveyed by contemporary academia is largely a function, paradoxically, of an expanding engagement with interdisciplinary studies, which has inspired opposition from those who associate this approach with hubristic incom332 BOOK REVIEWS petence and sloppy scholarship. It is precisely the thin ice of interdisciplinary dilettantism that was cracked open by the Swiftian physicist Alan Sokal, whose spoof article, "Transgressing the Boundaries," purporting to be a series of political extrapolations from recent developments in quantum physics, was published in 1996 by the unsuspecting editors of Social Text. He subsequently unmasked himself in Lingua Franca, explaining that his aim had been to expose the ease with which, in the heady climate fostered by "postmodern literary theory," one may substitute tendentious "citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions" for rigorous argument. Appearing on the heels of Sokal's instructive hoax, Everdell's wide-ranging and immensely learned book provides an edifying counter-demonstration of how one may illuminatingly—if not unproblematically—use scientific paradigm in order to elucidate a variety of extra-scientific developments . The First Moderns consists of twenty-two chapters, the first and last of which frame a chronologically arranged "narrative history of ideas" spanning from 1872 to 1913. Although temporally linear, the chapters move freely among a variety of major cities—Vienna, Paris, New York, London, Prague, Chicago, Munich, Saint Petersburg, Saint Louis—and light upon various thinkers as they make the discoveries and forge the innovations that Everdell identifies collectively as "Modernism." Fields discussed in this eclectic work include mathematics, physics, biology, genetics , histology, neurophysiology, psychology, philosophy, politics, painting, literature, sculpture, music, dance, military history, computer science, and film. Making liberal use of metaphors of natural cataclysms in order to capture the sense of epistemic rupture whose effects his study chronicles, Everdell spends a fair amount of time in the "epicenter of Modernism," Paris, and on the "cultural Vesuvius" of 1913. He is particularly interested in the determinative role played by the late-nineteenth and early...