Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (review)

Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative. By Harold B. Segel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 282 pp. $35.95

The illustrations to Harold B. Segel's Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative chart a peculiar path through the first half of the twentieth century. From theatrical pantomimes and German expressionist dance, through physical education movements, bodybuilding, and naked gymnastics, the illustrations culminate in a photograph from a Hitler Youth track meet. However reductionist, the trajectory of these illustrations approximates Segel's deterministic account of the body's place in the art, and then the politics of the first half of the twentieth century. According to Segel, "the Holocaust, in its way, can be understood as the last stage, the extreme fulfillment, of the modernist obsession with physicality" (8).

As Segel is the first to admit, "the vast subject of this book does not lend itself to easy systematization. Causality and sequentiality are difficult and at times impossible to establish except with respect to the totalitarian uses of the cult of physicality, for which we have an established chronology" (8). The difficulty Segel describes might suggest why no one has yet thought to implicate the Olympic games, modern dance, the Boy Scouts, or bodybuilding on the long march to the Holocaust. Segel's book contains much that is valuable, thought-provoking, and new. But the author's rush to a questionable finish detracts from a volume that might have offered much more.

Segel has published widely on modernist theater of various forms from Vienna to Moscow, and his knowledge of the dense network of theatrical activity in Europe, Russia, and North America is formidable. Indeed, the strongest chapter in the present work examines the interaction of body culture and theater in the early twentieth century. Segel's knowledge spans a variety of national theater traditions at the turn of the century and his discussion of those shed new light on familiar ground. His unbridled erudition also works against him. The dance chapter, for example, begins with American modern dancers and German expressionist dance, moves to a discussion of dance in plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, Sologub, and Hofmannsthal, then to the impact of the dance on the literature of the period. A tall order for 46 pages. Not surprisingly, there are gaps in these discussions. The modern dancers discussed represent the more radical wing of a complex, international dance boom in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet the enormously influential Diaghilev troupe, the darling of assorted European vanguard movements for two decades, is only mentioned.

The volume leans heavily on literary culture to make its points about the ascendancy of the body. The problem of this method becomes apparent in the third chapter, which treats men of letters and actions—and includes such strange bedfellows as Theodore Roosevelt, D'Annunzio, Marinetti, Nikolai Gumilyov, Saint-Exupéry, and (inevitably) Hemingway. Segel singles out writers to make his points about the impact of the "modernist physical imperative" (127), yet the discussion of these men's literary output is generally limited to quotes from their works with little analysis. D'Annunzio was 52 when World War I broke out and Segel writes that the war "provided the poet with an unparalleled opportunity show the stuff he was made of as a man, soldier, and patriot" (133). Fine, but D'Annunzio's literary output is not discussed, even though Segel describes him as the leading Italian writer of his day. To chart D'Annunzio's career as a fascist reveals little about fascism and even less of the man as a writer. Contrast this to the account of Theodore Roosevelt, whose literary output the author discusses, though not in detail. Certainly, the men mentioned in Segel's text exemplify a hyper-masculinity that typifies the macho of the avant-garde and the bravado of the Great War generation. (Should it surprise us, after all, that a group of men...