Ghostwriting Modernism, and: Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (review)

H.D. with a Ouija board; Baraka with a jazz band. Each pairing threatens to refute the other and both seem a world away from "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar." Yet these disparate couplings of poet and medium are recruited for similar new modernist projects in Helen Sword's Ghostwriting Modernism and Kimberly Benston's Performing Blackness, books determined to return once-repressed attachments to the forefront of literary modernism. Sword argues against the fading assumption that the ironic, materialist aesthetics of Anglo-American modernism barred its attraction to the transcendental, in this case, to popular spiritualism. Benston argues for the performance ethos of African American modernism, targeting the proposition that such modernism imagined blackness as a textual product instead of a dramatic practice. Together, the books testify to both the bracing innovations of the new modernist studies and this new wave's nourishing of received modernist ideas and styles.

Sword's excellent book is a model of sensible lucidity despite, or more likely because of, its spectral, enigmatic subject. With inspiration from Yeats's metaphor of the slumming muse, Sword unveils the illicit "relationship between mediumistic discourse—a destabilizing, low cultural, often implicitly feminized mode of speech and writing—and modernist literary aesthetics." By "mediumistic discourse," Sword means the prodigious textual output of spirit mediums, those professional conduits of communication between the quick and the dead who owe their living to the table-rapping Fox sisters of Rochester, founders of popular spiritualism in the revolutionary year of 1848. From the beginning, spirit mediums were not shy about acknowledging their likeness to imaginative authors: both groups, after all, ventriloquized the dead in written form. But it was not until the twentieth century, Sword contends, that this resemblance was admitted by the sort of male highbrows who had cheered the taming of young women with spiritualist pretensions in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) and James's The Bostonians (1886). World War I, the primary trauma in so many modernist histories, offered writers in mourning desperate reasons to credit spiritualist contacts with the dead. Yet it was the modernists' fresh respect for the texture and ontology of mediumistic discourse, Sword maintains, that made for spiritualism's surprising success in an era of bellicose materialism. Where nineteenth-century writers renounced spiritualism's "subversive celebrations of alternate, often explicitly feminine, modes of writing; its transgressions of the traditional divide between high and low culture; and its self-serving tendency to privilege form over content," twentieth-century writers recognized a fellow traveler.

Sword's vision of fruitful engagement between modernism and spiritualism demands redefinition of both, and her early chapters establishing the subversive paradoxes of "ghostwriting"—"a medium's publication of written messages supposedly authored in the spirit world"—rank as her most engaging and inventive. To her mind, Jane Sherwood, Hester Dowden, and other spiritualists who channeled and marketed works by dead white men anticipated the death of the author by breathing literary life into the deceased. Sword's three central chapters tracing the intense response of canonical modernists to such brazen ghostwriting are both less stimulating and more convincing. She confirms that when Joyce, Yeats, H.D., and Eliot courted postromantic impersonality by doing the police in different voices, they validated "the methods and forms, perhaps even the abject corporeality, of mediumistic discourse." The final disappointment of Sword's sophisticated, revealing book stems from the fact that her discovery of the spiritualism near modernism's heart winds up validating the modernism we have known for at least a decade. Rather than haunting modernist curators into a new relationship with their dearly departed, her mediumistic ghosts consecrate familiar concerns with modernist "authority and iconoclasm," and once more rediscover modernism's balanced devotion to "the...