Modernism, War, and Violence by Marina MacKay (review)

In our age of looming nuclear conflict and surging nationalism, the concept of modern war feels uncomfortably familiar. And yet, it is somehow easy to lose sight of what exactly makes a war, and literature's response to it, modern. Looking at the way that modernists saw war and violence gives us a chillingly lucid insight into this newly (still) relevant question. Although other critics have described the particular ways in which modernist writers have represented war and violence, Marina MacKay makes this topic new in her comprehensive and generative study, Modernism, War, and Violence. In this physically concise yet intellectually expansive volume, MacKay grants her reader a panoramic view of war and violence in Anglophone literature from the fin-de-siècle to the Cold War, offering many fresh and incisive ideas along the way.

MacKay insists on nuance and complication, never allowing her readers to rest in simple binaries. Most importantly, she delineates between war and violence, circumscribing the concept of war as only state-sanctioned violence. Yet she acknowledges the interchange between state-sanctioned war and violence that occurs outside of government edict. She does this most brilliantly in the third and central chapter "Modernism and Political Violence." Her observation about modernist critics' changing perspective on fictional terrorism—like the anticipated explosion at the end of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale—since 9/11 engenders both an anxious stomach knot and a hungry fascination.¹ This is also the chapter in which those interested in theorizing violence, terrorism, and war in the context of Irish Independence will feel most fulfilled. MacKay returns to this disabused twenty-first-century stance when she discusses aerial bombings in the chapter on "Modernism and the Second World War" and the epilogue "Cold War Modernism?" in a way that compounds both revelation and anxiety.

If the temporality that I have described or the authors that I have mentioned seem unfamiliar in terms of modernism, that is because MacKay extends the period at both ends, rejecting a modernism punctuated by World Wars, and instead reveals modernism's roots in the nineteenth century and its continuation in the mid-twentieth century. Joyceans, and modernists, will appreciate that the last lines of the volume illuminate the first lines, and so the study formally gestures toward a cyclical structure, even as it discusses a pattern of modernist forms, tropes, and images in times of violence. The final words, "to think about modernism, war, and violence is to consider not simply how literature responds to past events but its orientation toward events to come," aptly describe the way that the book begins, with MacKay's reconsideration of the literature of the turning century as already prefiguring modern war and violence (141).

And still MacKay dissects and inspects the divisions of modernists along the lines of the Great War. She adumbrates a modernism of the 1910s by "investigating this idea of a link between the war and the felt dissolution of old ideas" (35). A more mature literary modernism quelled this earlier symbolic thirst for war, however, since "[w]orking out a way to apprehend mass slaughter is among modernism's projects in the 1920s" (55). MacKay argues that this idea of working out loss reemerges in a surprisingly recognizable way in the reflective recursivity of writers who revisit modernist aesthetics and tropes during World War II. This is part of what she means by "the 'secondness' of the Second World War" (105). A reader can find more sustained readings and discussions of the writers and works that MacKay addresses in this chapter in her previous book Modernism and World War II, but she herself practices a reflective recursivity by allowing recent criticism of 1940s literature to reframe her revisitation of familiar texts.²

Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot loom large in this volume, which is logical given their continued creation of art from high modernism through World War II. Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, H...