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6. The Edge of Modernism: Genocide
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THE EDGE OF MODERNISM GENOCIDE AND THE POETICS OF TRAUMATIC MEMORY Walter Kalaidjian Seldom in the theories of social, cultural, and aesthetic modernisms has the repeated trauma of genocide appeared on the list of what defines the modern condition. Benchmarks in the critical reception of modernism would include Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God in The Gay Science; the epistemological revolution of Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudian psychoanalysis; the Fordist transformation of industrial society with its proliferation of the latest consumer goods, reified services, and attendant information flows; the fragmentation of representation as seen, say, in the formal techniques of the impressionist, cubist, futurist, and constructivist aesthetic movements, along with analogous tendencies in experimental poetics and prose, avant-garde music, dance, and performance art; the new discourses of, on the one hand, an agonized racial double consciousness 6 and, on the other, a celebration of the “renaissance” of race (albeit complicated by the colonial fetish of “primitivism”); progressive figures of class antagonism, experimental gender roles, “queer” sexual identities, and so on. Yet genocide is curiously elided in the critical reception of modernism. Amidst the wears and tears of postmodernism, the reigning discourses of the state, the media, and the academy have served arguably to repress, deny, and normalize the extreme experiences of total war and industrial mass murder.1 Not a phenomenon, however, that belongs to the distant past, genocide first happens within the turbulent forces of social modernism with its emerging systems of technology and rapid information exchange. Accompanying these sophisticated advances, genocide persists as the unthought underside to the socalled progress we have witnessed in the twentieth century. Repressed for the most part in the modern public sphere, the legacy of genocide troubles the closure of modernist periodization with the repetition of its event. Witnessed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Guatemala, the genocidal edge of modernism cuts through the social fabric of postmodernism. But equally important, the unfinished business of genocide’s revisionist historicism and political denial bleeds into our own moment. Thus in discerning literary modernism anew, we might begin with asking, What was the uniquely traumatic force of genocide in dissociating the modernist sensibility? Although the high moderns were not unmindful of “Old civilizations put to the sword,” their psychic tendency was to affirm—as Yeats has it in “Lapis Lazuli”—a Nietzschean “gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”2 Similarly, Eliot’s definitive work of modernist mourning, The Waste Land, also faces the Eastern European apocalypse of “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth.”3 Yet The Waste Land turns toward the consoling metaphysics of “What the Thunder Said” that prefigure Eliot’s later investments in the troubling conjuncture of Anglo-Catholicism and anti-Semitism.4 It is, of course, a critical commonplace that Eliot’s modern verse epic The Waste Land (1922) reflects the trauma of the First World War. Nowhere, however, has criticism observed that The Waste Land was conceived in the wake of the twentieth century’s first case of “total” state-administered genocide, undertaken in 1915 by the Young Turk government against the Armenian people. Canonical modernists such as, say, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Virginia Woolf were fully aware of the novum of human extermination as a modern portent of things to come. Pound, for example, foregrounded the ethicopolitical stakes of the Armenian genocide in his political journalism while a contributor to A. R. Orage’s weekly New Age in the 1910s. Just six months after the outbreak of mass murder in the Ottoman Empire, Pound cited the massacres as an unacceptable, international atrocity in order to W A L T E R K A L A I D J I A N 108 [44.200.40.97] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:24 GMT) press for U.S. entry into the First World War. Beyond the nationalist interests of its own domestic security, America in 1915, Pound argued, was being challenged by the broader “interest of humanity, concerning which Mr. Wilson has occasionally spoken.” Such ethicopolitical concern, he maintained, went to the heart of the “humanitarian aspirations” of the American enterprise both in its Enlightenment foundations and its subsequent Civil War over the abolition of slavery. Extending this humanitarian argument beyond America’s national borders and into the new global arrangements of international modernism, Pound sought to extend such state resistance to “tyranny” into the transnational public sphere. Drawing an analogy between American resistance to the “tyranny” of slavery in...