Apocalypse Jazz by Maggie Helwig (review)

HUMANITIES 139 complex mediation of economic capital (money) and symbolic capital (credibility in the avant-garde art world). This article gives a new theoretical foundation to what is surely the most understudied aspect of women's cultural production, not only in this century but also in the past. It also challenges the prevailing feminist approaches to the field of modernism by showing the diversity of women's positions, especially their large differences in power, within early twentieth-century culture. Dianne Chisholm's article on the writings of Monique Wittig also breaks new ground. Chisholm constructs a surprising, fresh, and wholly apt context for reading Wittig's Lesbian Body by comparing it to Norman O. Brown's Love's Body, and to the grotesque body of Mikhail Bakhtin as depicted in Rabelais and His World. I am particularly impressed with Chisholm's concluding argument about how Wittig's lesbian body resolves Bhaktin's problems of nostalgia, uncritical populism, and indifference to gender. This essay is the best discussion currently available of Wittig's particularity and universality as a lesbian, a radical, and a writer. In closing, recognition is due to the University of Toronto Press for its commitment to publishing a collection with this range. Linda Hutcheon and Paul Perron, the general editors of the Theory/Culture series in which Relmaging Women appears, are providing an inesthnable service to the academic community by fostering this kind of publication. In the era of shrinking markets, such conunitment is neither self-evident nor easily maintained. (SARAH WESTPHAL) Maggie Helwig. Apocalypse Jazz Oberon. 167. $12.95 paper Apocalypse Jazz is a collection of disparate essays held together by Maggie Helwig's interest in the apocalypse and the end of the millennium. Helwig distinguishes between apocalypse as an often poorly thought through and highly dangerous fascination with the destruction of the world, and as a spiritual drive towards profound personal, communal, and planetary transformation. She traces her concerns through a number of artists, cultural figures, and cultural phenomena: Glenn Gould, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Vaslav Nijinsky, Northrop Frye, Willialn Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, pop music, the atomic bomb, anorexia, Tiananmen Square, AIDS. (Jazz, unfortunately, is one cultural activity about which the book has nothing to say.) Helwig's spiritual, cultural, and personal urgency is compelling and appeals to the dissatisfaction and longing associated with the quest for a deeply better life. The range of her interests and reading is impressive and a number of her pieces are dizzying in their sweep. However, the effectiveness of her arguments is lUldermined by problems on a number of levels. . 140 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 Most seriously, notwithstanding its obvious relevance, Helwig overplays the ilnportance of apocalypse in contemporary culture and fails to provide much grounding for the promise of radical transformation. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent reduction of the risk of nuclear holocaust have, as Helwig admits, severely undercut the prominence of end-of-the-world thinking. Helwig argues that the importance of the millennium in Western culture continues to give urgency to apocalyptic concerns, which have seized on new non-nuclear phenomena such as AIDS and genetic engineering. A number of her apocalyptic readings, however, seem forced. Her point is least convincing in her discussion of Tiananmen Square, which she sees not as a political event but an apocalyptic one - this, despite her acknowledgment that apocalypse is a Western concept not to be imposed from without on non-Western situations. One historical development Helwig does not discuss, global capitalism (which is the development that most defines the current situation), imposes a profound limit on any transfonnation of society and the individual. Helwig, as part of a long prophetic tradition, is necessarily vague on how radical transformation is to take place - as she writes, 'There is nowhere I can go from here at this moment.' The reader is left in a similar situation. ApocalypseJazz also suffers from certain stylistic problems. Several of the essays run through a tremendous amount of material; long, undigested quotations and sweeping overviews produce a turgidity that undercuts the urgency of the matters under discussion. The tone throughout shifts uneasily from high spiritual seriousness to breezy opinion and irrelevant aside. Questionable declarations and...