Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (review)

Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. Michael North. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. vii + 269. $35.00.

Virginia Woolf famously opined that "in or about December, 1910, human character changed." For D. H. Lawrence, in turn, "it was in 1915 that the old world ended." In the Little Review, Ezra Pound proclaimed 30 October 1921 (date of his own thirty-sixth birthday and of Joyce's completion of Ulysses) as "the end of the Christian era" and proposed a new calendar in which 1922 would mark year one of a new aeon--this, uncannily, a full year before Mussolini's March on Rome and the dawning of the Era Fascista. Willa Cather, who observed "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," similarly registered the emergence of a brave new world, although from a more disgruntled perspective, her Pulitzer Prize novel of that year, One of Ours, having been swept into the dustbin of history by the younger male modernists who sarcastically dismissed it as a hopelessly retrograde exemplar of women's writing--after all, The Waste Land, according to Joyce, had definitively ended the idea of "poetry for ladies."

Michael North's Reading 1922 takes its place on the shelf alongside a number of other recent surveyings of watershed years--Thomas Harrison's 1910, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's 1926, and Bonnie Kime Scott's 1928. ¹ Desiring a more comprehensive understanding of "how the masterworks of literary modernism fit into the discursive framework of their time" (vi), North imagines himself in a bookstore of the annus mirabilis 1922, browsing among tables containing not just The Waste Land, Ulysses, Jacob's Room, Babbit, The Enormous Room, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Book of American Negro Poetry, and Harlem Shadows, but also Zane Grey's The Wanderer of the Wasteland, Anzia Yezerska's Salome of the Tenements, Charlie Chaplin's My Trip Abroad, Harry Leon Wilson's Merton at the Movies, Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, Otto Jesperson's Language, Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, A. R. Ratcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus--not to mention a host of newspapers and magazines such as the Illustrated London News, the Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, and the Dial.

An ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia, North has expertly rummaged through his virtual 1922 bookstore with a view to extending the "matrix of modernism" not only into the domains of philosophy, anthropology, and psychology but also into the emerging public sphere of radio, cinema, photography, advertising, and fashion--that is, into those broader cultural practices that allow modernism (or modernity) to mediate itself to itself through an ironic self-awareness of the factitiousness of the "world picture" (Heidegger) generated by the media in the age of mechanical reproduction. While North insists on the new post-war globalism and universalism informing 1922 modernism (which, as in Anthony Giddens's formulation, is forever generating its opposite, that is, an unsettling relativism and reflexivity), and while he borrows the key notion of geographical mobility from Raymond Williams to analyze modernism as a social formation, North's 1922 bookstore is curiously parochial, restricted as it is to Anglo-American cultural productions. This is, in short, a very English department annus mirabilis. Utterly missing from its purview are such foundational texts of Latin American modernism as Vallejo's Trilce, Mario de Andrade's "Hallucinated City," or Borges's early Ultraist poems and manifestoes. Spain (Ortega on modernity, Lorca lecturing on Andalusian canto jondo, Juan Ramon Jiménez's important Second Poetic Anthology) is similarly ignored, as is Germany: Rilke's miraculous February at Muzot goes unmentioned, as does the writing of Mann's Magic Mountain, Kafka's The Castle, Benjamin's "Task of the Translator," or the publication of the last volume of Spengler's Decline of the West, Hesse's Siddhartha, and Brecht's Drums in the Night. The...