Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) by Cathryn Setz (review)

Cathryn Setz’s Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) is a book based on a “thought experiment”: “What if we were to read a modernist journal as if it were a novel, or even a person?” The journal is transition, a literary magazine based in Paris which featured Surrealist, Expressionist, and experimental prose and poetry, including several installments of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Its editor (and sometime writer and translator) Eugene Jolas, a French-American journalist with a predilection for mystic visions and an abiding faith in something he called the “Revolution of the Word,” is the backbone of Setz’s study.

Transition created contention within modernist circles. Aldous Huxley snidely pointed out that “backwards it spells NO IT ISN(T) ART,” but Joyce paid equally witty tribute to Jolas in a limerick (“There’s a genial young poetriarch Euge . . .”). Mainstream critics found it baffling or ridiculous; conservatives lumped it in with other “extreme left” publications; leftists accused it of being an escapist bourgeois rag. But its importance seems undeniable. Its list of authors reads like a Who’s Who of modernism—Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Louis Zukofsky, Max Ernst, and Franz Kafka in translation—and, for its devotees (including Henry Miller), transition was transformative.

A study of an entire journal is an enormous, unwieldy undertaking, and Setz wisely anchors her book in a particular aesthetic motif within transition: animals. Jolas and his contributors were fascinated by animals that are cold, strange, or phylogenetically distant from humans: “jellyfish and spiders, praying mantises and vermin, amphibians and fossils.” Setz focuses on this animal imagery to show that transition’s modernism was built on an obsession with the primordial. The magazine’s authors sought a form of literary expression that could unlock, in Jolas’s words, “the mantic forces of pre-historic man,” or that could recognize humans as standing “in direct line with the primeval strata of life.” Symbolic animals—most notably the amoeba, fish, lizard, and bird, each the subject of one chapter—act as guides within the dream-like primitivist world of transition.

Chapter 1, “Amoeba,” examines how the amoeba and the “primordial ooze” became, in Surrealist and Dadaist circles, emblems of “biomorphic abstraction” (as opposed to geometric abstraction) and of the watery origins of life itself. This chapter analyzes visual art alongside poetry; of particular interest here are Archibald MacLeish’s semi-parodic “Birth of Eventually Venus,” Bryher’s urban-primordial “Different Focus,” and the under-studied Blanche Matthias’s “The Formless Ones at Carmel Point.”

Chapters 2 and 3, “Fish” and “Lizard,” offer two very different case studies of the politics of transition’s primordial modernism. On the one hand, there is Joyce, whose piscine imagery in “Shem the Penman,” Setz argues, works against eugenicist discourses of degeneration by making the fish a symbol of life and creativity. On the other hand, there is Gottfried Benn, the Nazi writer and transition contributor whose fixation on the primitive “pineal eye” of lizards and man went hand in hand with his blood-and-soil racism. Setz is careful to distinguish between Benn’s fascist primitivism and Jolas’s naïve but internationalist outlook (intriguingly, after the war Jolas was put in charge of denazifying German newspapers!). Still, the takeaway from these two chapters seems to be that the primordial aesthetic could be put to very different political ends. Transition thus documents the extent to which American and European avant-gardes were attracted to fascism.

The final chapter, “Bird,” zeroes in on Jolas himself as a writer, translator, and editor. Jolas’s optimism, romanticism, and aesthetics of transcendence are captured in the figure of the bird in flight. At the same time, transition’s poetic birds are the site of a conflict between Jolas’s dispositional idealism and the exhaustion and disillusionment of the age. This is, to my mind, the most surprising and innovative of the four chapters. If the main currents of the previous three—abstraction, biomorphism, primitivism, degeneration, fascism, internationalism—are...