Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty (review)

There was a profound crisis of sovereignty in the early twentieth century, whether we consider this in relation to the emergence of new kinds of territorial sovereignties across Europe after the First World War or whether we are attuned to the philosophical arguments about sovereignty which marked the period. Carl Schmitt, for example, argued influentially and controversially that sovereignty should be transferred from the people to the authoritarian individual “who decides on the exception” while thinkers on the left such as Harold Laski insisted that the workers should maintain their sovereignty in the face of the growing demands of the state. An understanding of the emergence of the new sovereign state of Ireland in 1922, for example, and the way that this in turn destabilized existing concepts of British sovereignty, is important for the interpretation of modernist writers such as Yeats and Joyce, Eliot and Lewis. An awareness of the conflicting political and philosophical arguments in the 1920s about where sovereignty should lie, in the president or prime minister, the people or the parliament, is also important when considering modernist texts, not least because many modernists were critical of parliamentary democracy.

In this new book Andrew John Miller engages with the fascinating question of modernism’s relationship to sovereignty, focusing in particular on the conflict between nationalist and mass democratic claims to state and authorial authority. His is a specific take on this question. We are perhaps used to thinking about the way that “deterritorialized fantasies of ethnic nationalism overwhelm the fragile mechanisms of civic nationalism” in contemporary politics (ix). Miller argues that this model can also tell us much about the narrative and poetic imaginations of early twentieth century writers. He argues, then, that W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf cultivate what Donald Pease has theorized as a “postnational” perspective, which he describes as the use of “national discourses in a provisional, as opposed to an essentialistic, fashion.” (98) In practice this means that modernist writers were interested in forms of affiliation which were at odds with territorial sovereignty. Yeats’s writing, then, registers and imagines non-geographical kinds of sovereignty, such as those of the Irish diaspora and the networks of imaginary affiliation at work in a global economy. Eliot explores the conflict between the universal and international claims to sovereignty of the Christian tradition and what he sees as the procedural and litigious claims of territorial sovereignties. Woolf meanwhile criticizes patriarchal and imperialistic nationalisms in the name of a feminist cosmopolitanism which is specifically beyond nationality.

There is much to enjoy in this book. Chapter Four illuminates the vexed issue of Eliot’s relationship to national and institutional structures of liberal democracy. While a number of critics have discussed this question in previous books and essays, Miller helpfully takes the argument forward by considering the competing claims to sovereignty in Eliot’s views on the Christian Church and the nation state.

Chapter Five, which focuses on Woolf’s Between the Acts, also constructs a fascinating and subtle argument about the limits of sovereignty in her writing. Miller discusses how “Woolf’s efforts to think beyond the collective narratives of the nation-state are conducted in conjunction with a broader questioning of the patriarchal lineage of sovereign authority” (144). This is to work within and perceptively extend established accounts of Woolf’s politics.

Chapters Two and Three, which focus on Yeats’ work, are perhaps the most contentious. Miller is particularly keen to argue against accounts of Yeats’s “Irish” literary identity, seeking to problematize the stable entity of “Ireland” which would make such claims possible. Yet, at this point the book would have benefited from a more extensive explanation of the specificity of the “postnational” perspective: many key theorists of Yeats’ nationalism, for instance, register the provisional and changing, rather than essential, nature of nation. Miller dismisses some of these critics a bit too quickly. There is a long section attacking Michael North’s account of Yeats’s choice between a “citizenship based...