Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (review)

Invited by I.A. Richards on a Basic English junket to China, T.S. Eliot apparently replied: “I do not care to visit any country which has no native cheese.” William Empson remembers a similar response from Eliot: him saying somewhere “‘I find I can no longer travel except where there is a native cheese. I am therefore bounded, northwards by Yorkshire’ ( . . . and the rest of the points of the compass were all tidy (I think he had a fair run to the south) but I no longer know what they were.” However apocryphal, these stories go some way towards describing the global character of the modernist imaginary, delimited, as it were, by the availability of European raw-milk, artisanal cheeses. The craving of such cheese is a good synecdoche for the promises and desires of cosmopolitan community (as well as, what I take to be, the realities of its consumerist subtext). If Eliot were around today, we might well find him a signatory of the Slow Food movement’s “Manifesto in Defense of Raw-milk Cheese,” doing battle with mass produced food, advocating “rootedness and decentralization (plus the ensuing conservation of typicality).” As with Slow Food’s reterritorialization of the local, the paradox of modernist cosmopolitanism is that its reinvention of the community depends on a parochialism by other means practiced in the most super-attenuated of circumstances, i.e., loose networks of learned initiates and affiliates staging their convivia in select Großtädte, developing communal affiliations without recourse to nation-states.

Jessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community is a timely book. Modernism—as both cultural formation and academic sub-specialization—has found itself somewhat sidelined by the academic turn to the problematics of colonialism and postcolonialism. Putting aside “imperialism” on the one hand and “Empire” on the other, Berman makes a compelling case for cosmopolitan discourse as modernism’s own contribution to geocultural imagining, and one of her most forceful points is that the three vectors of her title belong in the same interpretive frame, that the recourse to cosmopolitanism is a fictional strategy carrying freight for a particularly utopian version of Gemeinschaft and moving it beyond the framework of nationality. She shows effectively the specific reasons each of her literary subjects—Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein—had pressing narratological stakes in constructions of “cosmopolitan communities” as alternative communal affiliations accommodating difference in forms that the existing nation-state denies. Thus, in Berman’s account, James, Proust, Woolf, and Stein were not only among the first to register the limitations and indeed very obsolescence of the nation-state but also among the first to experiment with social narratives that made space for the poetics of the other and the politics of difference.

Yet, what is crucial in Berman’s study is not cosmopolitanism as material and promotional practice—not modernist dissemination and shared tissue of promotion as cosmopolitan subculture—but the cosmopolitan premises staged in the fiction itself—or, at least, in the imaginative work of her modernist quartet of Londoners and Parisians. Manifesting cosmopolitanism as a kind of post-political resentment, modernist narrative strategies, she argues, effect a return of that which is repressed by the modernity’s inter-subjective domination: community in itself beyond the self. The main point is that those who have heretofore only observed latent hesitations and anxieties about universal subjectivity in modernist fiction (and its attendant binds for gender, sexual, and racial alterity) have missed half the story. Even as such anxieties emerge, they are re-cathected in a utopian form, reinscribed along a liberatory and progressive axis so that stateless subjectivity and cosmopolitian affiliation become forms of a conceptual idealism that even today, she argues, “can provide meaningful alternative versions of community” (3).

The book’s method proceeds through some crisp close reading and “cultural parataxis,” laying out elective affinities and homologies between fictional, social, and cultural constituents (4). The latter allows Berman to obtain some of her most...